Don't burn books, burn TV shows!

July 29, 2009 1:13 PM

I want to preferably burn some shows I recorded from TV and are stored on my TiVo. Please hope me or show me how I can better google a solution.

Most of the info I'm finding on doing this is a few years old. I have a TiVo series 2 and a Comcast digital cable connection. As storage space on my TiVo harddrive will soon run out and I want to keep my shows.
The stuff I want to keep is not available on DVD or iTunes or any other way I can find (if they were, I would happily buy them! I am not attempting to get around purchasing something in case that's a question.)
Some stuff I have found on YouTube or Hulu but others defy me and YouTube isn't as satisfying as watcing TV to me.
Has anyone here purchased a DVD with recording capability for this purpose? If so do you have any hints or tips or other ways to go about this? Or is it better to try to get the TiVo content on my PC?
I used to be able to use TiVo Desktop on my PC, but long ago that stopped working and so that's out unless someone knows a fix.

I am not opposed to throwing a little money at this problem but not many hundreds if it can be helped.

posted by pointystick to computers & internet (11 comments total)

If you have a Mac, then Roxio Titanium includes a solution for transferring files from your Tivo to your Mac and then burn the show onto a Dvd.

Failing that, you can buy a DVD Recorder, hook it up like you would a vcr, play the show on the tivo and record it.
posted by digividal at 1:38 PM on July 29

looks like Lifehacker has the answer you're looking for.
posted by doorsfan at 1:38 PM on July 29

Have you checked out any BitTorrent sites?
You are already paying for HBO or whatever.
eztv is good, but not working 100% right now, you can still get the torrents at torrent.zoink.it
and www.mininova.org is okish.
posted by Iax at 1:41 PM on July 29

Check this page. The combination of the Tivo Desktop Plus and the Roxio should allow you to move your shows to your pc and burn them to disc just fine.
posted by teleri025 at 1:56 PM on July 29

Can you elaborate on Tivo Desktop and in what way it's not working? Have you tried downloading the latest version? You shouldn't even need to buy Tivo Desktop Plus, fix the free version and you're good to go.
posted by IanMorr at 2:00 PM on July 29

For Windows: try removing and reinstalling Tivo Desktop. If that doesn't work, try pyTivo, KMTTG to transcode to MPEG and either convert that to DVD format or, better, compress it down and get a DVD player that handles Xvid/mkv/M4A/etc.
posted by holgate at 2:06 PM on July 29

Funny, I was just reading about this on AVSforum an hour ago and thought "jeez, that's a good writeup". Be sure and read the short discussion that follows that post.

pyTivo is somewhat user-unfriendly. The creators just aren't that interested in making it perfectly easy for regular folks.

See above link for discussion of the relative merits of kmttg and VideoRedo. The latter does have a non-zero cost, but I'm a firm believer in the rule that "free" software is frequently free only if your time is worthless.

In the above link they're talking about HD, which I guess your Series 2 can't do, but you still get the gist of it.

And you can always just go low tech and connect the S-video out to a DVD recorder and record the DVDs that way!
posted by intermod at 8:15 PM on July 29

If you're on a mac, TiVoDecodeManager is an awesome simple GUI app that lets you log into your tivo and rip shows off it over your network. I wrote it up on my Roxio Toast (negative) review here on PVRblog.
posted by mathowie at 8:47 PM on July 29

Thanks for all the good advice, y'all. I am on A PC so no cool Mac stuff for me.
I like both the low tech and high tech options. Going to try the cheap DVD-R first and then mess with the other stuff and will post results.
Thanks!
posted by pointystick at 7:21 AM on July 30

Oh, and IanMorr, I uninstalled TivO desktop because I kept getting "server not found". It used to work fine, but a year ago stopped and I get that message on start up. Everything else on the TiVo works fine. I will try to reinstall. Any tips on that are welcome too!
posted by pointystick at 7:22 AM on July 30

The Tivo Community Forums would be a good resource for getting help on the tivo desktop front.
posted by garlic at 1:12 PM on July 31