"She asked me if we could be friends..."

So, I recorded Sign o' the Times on our TiVo this past weekend, and ever since I've been trying to figure out how to get it off of the TiVo. As in, off of the TiVo, and onto a DVD or my (Mac) laptop.

But so BTW, before I delve into the tech stuff, a brief aside that's worthy of the main post, as opposed to a footnote: Sign o' the Times is so fucking awesome. And it's not really easily available on DVD, which is just totally lame.

Favorite things about Sign o' the Times:

• When, during "Hot Thing," Prince slides across the stage under Cat Glover's legs, and rips off her skirt with his teeth. (Or, I guess, almost—he actually appears to grab it with his hand, then transfer it to between his teeth. Yes, I've now watched this part too many times in the writing of this post.) But still: how awesome is Prince!


• This movie is just so brilliantly directed. The cuts & closeups are as good as a music video, which is pretty incredible with what appears to be concert footage. [1]


• This is a really great mini-review of the movie. Of course, it would be, as the author wrote a book on the subject.
  


• "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man". Best. Song. EVAR.

So, all of that said: We only have Macs around the house (around 6 of them now that we've amassed, but quantity doesn't help, in this case), so we can't use TiVoToGo. And really, what I most want is just to be able to burn this to a DVD, so I can watch it over & over again. It seems so simple: it's a file, made of bits, on a hard drive on (what is basically) a Linux box, that is on our fucking network. Why can't I just mount the box and copy the file to my laptop, then play it? [2]

So finally, from a comment on this post, I figured out part of the answer:

Open up a web browser and go to https://(the ip address of your tivo)/nowplaying/index.html and login as tivo with a password of your media access code (from the Tivo view settings screen) It will let you access a website where you can download the *.tivo files of your shows.

Yay! Now I have the .tivo file, though I can't actually do anything with it without a PC with TiVo ToGo.

And yet somehow, just the idea of having this file on my own hard drive makes me feel so much more secure!

Prince: you're safe now.

[1] Of course, it's not actually concert footage, which is the reason it looks so good. It turns out it's a lot easier when you reshoot the entire movie at your own studio!

[2] This is a rhetorical question.

Comments

[Matt Haughey]

Install TiVotool. It should be able to read .tivo files in iTunes

http://tivotool.com/screenshots/screenshots.html

[btrott]

TiVotool only works with a hacked TiVo, though, right? Ours is unhacked. :) I'll try the DirectShow Dump method when I get access to a PC.

[btrott]

Update, for posterity: using the instructions at http://www.salingfamily.net/trav/osx/tivo1.html (and a PC) I was able to extract the MPEG-2 video from the .tivo file. Yay!