Use cTiVo to download your TiVo programs to your Mac

In the past, one of the only options available to transfer files off your TiVo and onto your Mac was iTivo. It is a simple utility that performed admirably  when it worked. The biggest issue was it's infrequent updates. Every time Apple Mac OS was updated you needed to use your terminal skills to get iTiVo to work again. I've written several blog posts giving instructions on how to get iTiVo working after the upgrade to Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Tivo & the Mac - Downloading Tivo files
Continuing Adventures with iTiVo
TiVo to Mac - Mountain Lion Edition
TiVo to Mac - iTivo Update

Recently Apple just released Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks and once again iTiVo was broken. Rather than dive in and try to fix it I hit up Google to see what everyone else was saying. Low and behold I stumbled across an application called cTivo.  

All I can say is WOW! Finally! An application that works out of the box without any terminal tweaking. Where have you been hiding cTiVo?!?

cTivo describes itself like this:

"cTiVo is inspired by the great work done on iTiVo, but written in Cocoa/Objective C for better performance and compatibility. Current or former users of iTiVo will find a detailed comparison and upgrade path described in iTivo Users."

It's much faster than iTiVo and once you put in your TiVo's MAK address it will scan your network for all your TiVo devices. 

There are a lot of preference settings to play with that give you tons of options.

You can download the decrypted file or transcode it to many different formats to match your device.

Once you have selected the show to download and the format you want click the download button and it will start to download. 

Download progress is marked with a red highlight bar. Additional files are queued up and automatically downloaded when the first file finishes. 

If you have used iTiVo in the past, run, don't walk, and download cTiVo. It looks like the days of struggling with iTiVo are over. Unlike iTiVo the last update for cTiVo was 2014. I just hope that the developers keep the updates coming.