iTunes on Tivo?

August 6, 2006 12:05 PM

Is there a way to transfer tv shows downloaded from iTunes from my pc to my tv via Tivo desktop?

Tivo doesn't seem to recognize any of my iTunes files, (even the music ones) is there a way to fix this?

posted by saucy to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM.

ITMS (iTunes Music Store) files can only be played on a computer running iTunes, or an iPod. I can think of no real way to transfer the videos to your Tivo. Music can be burned to a cd, and then reencoded to a DRM free format. Video, dunno.
posted by zabuni at 12:36 PM on August 6, 2006 [1 favorite]

Try VirtualDub, or DivX Create to re-encode the files. There are a lot of guides out there on video conversion, check out Doom9.org for a plethora of guides. Hope this helps.
posted by Hexidecimal at 2:59 PM on August 6, 2006

zabuni is right, those files are DRM'd and i dont think anyone has figured out how to crack them yet.

i think the video ipod can output ntsc video, so you might be able to play the video out of the ipod into some kind of ntsc capture box. this is known as going through the 'analog hole' and the MPAA mofos are trying to close it as well with all kinds of crazy watermarking stuff.
posted by joeblough at 8:40 PM on August 6, 2006

It was possible to scrub the DRM from music files. Hymn was able to do it up through iTunes 6 (based on a quick read). There might be other ways to scrub the DRM. There's a lesson here. Get yourself an eMusic subscription for their mp3s sans DRM and get thee to yourmusic.com to buy CDs of back catalog. Rip stuff yourself in the future.

As for video, there's no good answer, I don't think for de-drming without significant reencoding issues.
posted by shagoth at 7:07 AM on August 7, 2006