Can you put video from your computer onto TiVo boxes?

Cafe Society
1

This would be a “hack”, but in a benign sense… I don’t see any reason this would be an inappropriate topic to post, so I’m going to go ahead with it…
You can connect your computer to your tivo to do stuff like download programming guides from the internet… and you can “hack” it to do stuff like control the tivo from your computer or extract video… I’m thinking of grabbing a usb-ethernet adapter to connect my computer to my tivo, and I’m wondering - is there a way to push video onto the tivo box? It’d be pretty cool if you could take any video from your computer and then transfer it to your tivo box for TV viewing.

2

I don’t think it’s a hack - just a regular feature of TiVo2Go. You need a home network (wired or wireless), a series 2 TiVo (and a USB network adapter), and TiVo Desktop installed on your computer. The only restriction is the video has to be a specific format to be recognized by TiVo (MPG with a specific resolution and frame rate). You can find all the info you need at TiVo.com and TiVoCommunity.com.

3

I use the Videora TiVo Converter free tool based on ffmpeg to convert videos, works like a champ. The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is the length indicator. The entire video will play but Tivo won’t fast forward through the entire video.

4

Does this still work? And with series2? thanx

5

I use pyTivo.

https://pytivo.sourceforge.io/wiki/index.php/PyTivo

6

The free version of TiVo Desktop has not been updated in years but still works and can be downloaded here.

The difference between the Plus version is that, in your case, the files have to be in MPEG2 format. The plus version autoconverts from several formats and then streams the video. For the free version you need to convert it yourself if needed.

Info on Desktop Plus from TiVo here. Configuration is mostly the same as the free version.

Other programs like PyTivo and kmttg exist and the best source to learn about them is the TiVo Community board.

7

PyTivo used to be a program that was a pain to figure out how to set-up. Now it’s a piece of cake. As far as TiVo Desktop still working, it no longer works very good at all, and I had the plus version. Now that PyTivo is so simple to set up and use, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone mess with it.