The thousand robots blog has some good news for people who own both a Mac and a Tivo:
They are working on it right now, and are hoping to ship something in the first quarter of 2006. He was reluctant to give me even that vague date, because the ship date could slip and he didn’t want to be held to that prediction yet. Fair enough.
I asked him what the specific problem was that needed to be solved for Mac support. He said that Apple’s implementation of MPEG2 in Quicktime is incompatible with Tivo’s implementation of MPEG2. He’s said he’s put in a ton of calls to Apple in the last year asking them to “fix” it, but he was told they “don’t have time” and so have never gotten around to it. He said that his engineers thought they knew how to fix the issue, but Apple wasn’t interested in committing the resources to it. Apple also told him they are re-engineering Quicktime and are planning to release a new version next year, and that Tivo should just wait for that. He seemed genuinely frustrated by the whole thing. I don’t know much about video codecs, but later I was wondering whether Tivo couldn’t just offer some other MPEG2 codec with Tivo Desktop that would enable TivoToGo. Would that be possible? Sorry if that’s a stupid question.
Now if only there were more hope for people like me who own a DirecTV Tivo, but DirecTV seems very intent on their current strategy of not enabling the better features in Tivo like TivoToGo so that they can sell their own solution.
