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How to automate tivodecode on Mac OSX, so you can convert your TiVo files to save space, add them to iTunes, etc.

For the impatient, there's a summary at the bottom...

TiVo is great for being able to transfer the shows you record to your computer so you can save them. However, as always, the problem is with the restrictive wrappers put on by the TiVo, which prohibits you from doing things like transcoding the files to save space and watching them in the player of your choice.

Thankfully, there's a way to strip the shackles from the TiVo files and leave yourself with a standard MPEG2 file, that you can then convert to the encoding of your choice. It's a no-brainer: 4 GB/hour for an HD TiVo file that only plays in proprietary software, versus a H.264 file that looks great and plays in any player, at less than 500MB/hour.

If you don't have the TiVo Transfer software, you can use http://tdm.sourceforge.net/, which takes care of connecting to the TiVo, downloading the files, de-shackling the files, and transcoding - however, it feels buggy, and I prefer to use the standard TiVo Transfer program that's included with Roxio's Toast.

Once you have your TiVo shackled files on OSX, the next step is running them through a program called TiVoDecode. It's open source, and you can compile it yourself from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tivodecode/ or if you don't have the Developer tools installed, you can download the above mentioned TiVo Decode Manager, and pull the binary out of it. (Right Click TiVoDecode Manager › Show Package Contents › Contents › Resources › copy the 'tivodecode' file elsewhere, I recommend ~/Applications/.)

Once you have tivodecode as a binary file you can use terminal (just execute the command to get the syntax) or - what sparked this post - you can use my very simple Automator workflow to automate the process.

Just open the workflow in Automator, insert you MAK (Media Access Key) into the shell script (you can get this from your TiVoTransfer preferences), run the workflow, and select your TiVo files.

As you can tell from the shell script, the workflow assumes your tivodecode binary is in ~/Applications - that's not your standard Applications folder, it's inside your Home user folder. If you don't have one, just open your home folder and create it.

(If you're the type that prefers to mv tivodecode to /usr/bin/, then I'm sure you'll be able to modify the shell script accordingly.)

After running the workflow, your TiVo files will be run through the tivodecode binary and .mpg added. The original .tivo files will be moved to your trash, but not emptied. Then you can transcode into your preferred encoding. I recommend using Handbrake and the iPhone preset.

The more skilled among you may wish to transcode the files automatically in the workflow using ffmpeg or mencoder, however, that's a bit beyond me for the moment, and I like using Handbrake for its intelligent cropping on a file by file basis. Any suggestions on how I can accomplish this automatically are welcome in the comments.

Summary: