Engadget has published a review of the upcoming TiVo desktop software that brings many of the familiar sounds of TiVo and makes transferring files to portables easier, but it also ends being able to strip out the DRM that you can do now. Here's an excerpt:
"First the good news. TiVo is now bundling a software player to view TiVo-recorded shows on WindowsXP. It offers the familiar green status bar, Tivo functions such as replay, and TiVo sound effects. The software makes it pretty easy to see which codecs and filters are being used and to make changes if needed. Second a little more good news. It seems they are phasing out the TiVo Playback Password as it is redundant and probably due to the bad news.
"The bad news is that apparently TiVo has created some sort of ‘access control list’ preventing certain applications, such as Dr. DivX and TMPGEnc, from accessing .tivo files. Sonic MyDVD still works fine for burning TiVoToGo files to DVD, so I believe that Tivo’s strategy might be to identify programs being used to manipulate video and then block them to prevent conversion and/or removal of the DRM. That said, there are still a few other software players had no trouble opening .tivo files and certain more obscure video transcoding applications (which we shouldn’t name) were ALSO able to open the files, so it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here. I’ll keep playing around with TiVo Desktop 2.1 to see what else I can figure out." Source: Engadget
Engadget has published a review of the upcoming TiVo desktop software that brings many of the familiar sounds of TiVo and makes transferring files to portables easier, but it also ends being able to strip out the DRM that you can do now. Here's an excerpt: