This just in: Roxio charging $99 for free software

I've got 3 words for you.

Boston Tivo Party.

Huck those crapboxes into the sea!

UPDATE: the upgrade price + coupon code is now $53.99 downloaded immediately. no rebate. sweet.

this Toast upgrade is pointless to me until Tivo enables Series 3 tivo to go.

Complain about it all you want. I paid for the upgrade. $30 off coupon for upgrading. $10 off for placing the order when I first visited yesterday. So, I got my upgrade for $60. Started burning my Dr. Who episodes this morning, right after reading everyone else's whining about price. Going to Bahamas tomorrow with my shows on DVD... Priceless.

Gimme a break guys... You will never be happy. Did you guys not notice the street price of Toast 8 (~$85), the rebate (up to $30), the fact that you get a free glo remote (worth $50) if you order from Roxio??? Also, as was pointed out on the Tivo Community forums, the MPEG2 codec in Mac OS X is only usable by the DVD Player, so TiVo would have to pay for a license...so it COULD NEVER BE A FREE SOLUTION. To get the same full-blown rip, convert, DVD burn solution on the Windows side requires them to pay for Sonic MyDVD. Did it occur to you rocket scientists that maybe they had a cheaper more basic version on the verge of being released alongside Toast and the freeware hackaround spurred them to pull it? Why support your own app when the opensource folks will take care of it for you?? We are not being screwed in any horrible way compared to the Windows folks.

Toast is a great app... And, as someone who does not want a geeky El Gato solution or a crappy Comcast DVR I have to say TiVo is the only game in town for me. TiVo certainly has its missteps, don't get me wrong, but this is not a horrible one. Heck, if you guys don't want to pay for it, go get the free solution and direct your anger at TiVo for taking two years to get you a solution... But don't fall into the typical stereotype everyone on the planet has of us Mac users as NEVER being happy unless it comes from Apple itself and/or is free. It's rants like the ones above that make people roll their eyes at me when I tell them how great the Mac platform is.

While I'm reading this, a free, third party program is archiving shows off my ReplayTV. The shows are stored in MPEG natively, so I could easily run a script to convert them to iPod-size (if my iPod wasn't black and white) or transcode to mp4 or something.

I'm sure one of you Tivo fanatics has laughed at ReplayTV owners. Now it's our turn. :) Don't forget our commercial skip, no extra blipverts, and ability for many ReplayTV users to send shows to other owners over the net... too bad they're not for sale any more :)

I have an EyeTV 500 and Toast 7, and I do appreciate the way they work together. If I had a Tivo, I certainly wouldn't be disappointed by the integration. But having it be the only supported method for .tivo playback on Macs seems really heavy-handed of Tivo. I understand the benefit for Toast, but how is this really a win for Tivo?

I used to be a huge fan of my TiVo ... but one thing after another, and finally THIS has convinced me to DITCH them. They obviously don't care about the Mac platform ... waiting for a third party developer to do the hard work and probably cashing in on a pretty hefty royalty for doing so.

They charge for their hardware (you *could* settle for the standard def hardware and get it for free) and then kill you with an extra monthly fee or $300 before you can even turn the thing on!

I am currently in the process of writing my own Tivo-ish program that will interface with my EyeTV and newly purchased Mac Mini. The best thing is, running it from my Mac I have all the flexibility I could possibly want.

Good riddance TiVo!

Free..
http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2006-12/tivotogo-on-your-mac/

#3, Actually, TiVo Desktop for Mac doesn't allow playback at all. The only way to get free on-computer playback on a mac (for instance, to watch shows on your laptop while on the plane) is to strip the DRM with tivodecode, and that's questionably legal.

I wholeheartedly agree that forcing the playback functionality (free for windows users) to be bundled with expensive burning software is just another poke in the eye to the Mac TiVo users and will keep them running to alternative solutions.