Author Archives: Scott Selikoff

Toast 10 Review for Tivo Users

Posted on by
Reply

About a year ago I wrote an article about transferring files from a Tivo to an iPod/iPhone using the Tivo Desktop software for Window. This year, I decided to try the Mac solution, which unlike the Windows solution requires a third party product, namely Roxi’s Toast 10 Titanium. Being familiar with the often buggy Windows software package, I picked up a copy of the Mac version expecting to be “Wow’ed” by the endless number of features listed and some reviewers who claimed Toast 10 would be my absolute best friend. What I discovered was another severely limited piece of software with a number of crippling, show-stopping features.

1. Dead on Arrival on Snow Leopard
First off, if you happened to upgrade to Snow Leopard, which now includes 18% of all Mac users, you’ll be surprised to learn Roxio’s Tivo Transfer fails to launch when you open it. Even though its been over a month since Snow Leopard was released, Roxio has yet to create an official replacement. Granted, they created a pre-release version available that you can download separately, but I’d feel safer had they released a stable version for the ever growing number of Snow Leopard users.

2. Auto-Transfer: 0 options
On the Windows version of the Tivo Desktop application, you can create an auto-transfer pass for a show, which often downloads the top 3 most recent episodes of a single show. On the Windows version, you have the option of configuring this to download more or less episodes of the show as you’d like. On the other hand, the Toast 10 version only allows you to download all of the episodes of a show, with no ability to restrict them. In fact, in one test I created an auto-transfer which automatically selected 30 episodes of a show, then removed half of the episodes in the download queue, only to have the software automatically recreate them. Apparently, it really wants to download 100% of the episodes of a show!

Without further ado, I present all the options for the Tivo Transfer service on a Mac:


3. Auto-Transferring to Portable Devices: 0 options
Transferring a file to a portable device involves taking the file downloaded from the Tivo and feeding it into Toast which can support a number of conversions. As a bonus, Toast added the ability to send downloaded files to Toast for conversion, which in turn get loaded into iTunes. Unfortunately, as may have noticed in the screenshot above, they lack the ability to set ‘which kind of portable device’.

This might not be so bad if the file that ended up in iTunes could be transferred to an iPhone/iPod, but for whatever reason, the m4v file produced by Toast 10 automatically was not iPhone compatible. In other words, even though you waited an hour for the file to transfer and another hour for the file to be converted for “a” portable device, you have to spend another hour re-encoding if you want to use it on your iPhone/iPod. On top of all of this, there’s no where to specify where the portable versions of the episodes go! They just get dropped into the Movies folder by default.

4. Destroying Meta-data is Not Cool
The previous two issues involved the auto-transfer option, which as I explain, is extremely limited. Now, let’s say you want to open Toast and convert the file to an iPhone format yourself. When you open a TV episode in Toast, all the information about the show is available and easy to read such as show name, episode name, etc. This information comes from the Tivo unaltered and is easy to read. For whatever reason, after you convert a show to an iTunes format (even if you select iPod/iPhone), the meta-data is extremely muddled. The series name now consists of the actual show name plus the episode, such as “Scrubs_My_Way_Home_WPIX_1018282”, which means iTunes is going to group every episode of a show as its own show. I’m not sure who wrote the meta-data mapping tool Toast 10 is relying on, but clearly this is not a well tested option as it requires you to open iTunes and fix all the episode information after every conversion.

5. Auto-Nothing
Despite Toast 10’s claim to support a large number of features, users have to spend hours at their computer to get a clean transfer. Consider the transfer of a single episode:

  1. Launch Tivo Transfer, wait 5 minutes for list of shows to populate
  2. Pick show to transfer, wait 30-60 minutes (or longer if your Tivo or Mac are wireless) to get the Tivo-encoded video
  3. If you have Tivo’s auto-export to Toast enabled, add 45 minutes for the conversion
  4. Re-encode file to work with your iPod/iPhone using Toast or iTunes adds another 45 minutes
  5. Open up iTunes and clean up meta-data about show, another few minutes

All and all, transferring a single show is an extremely time consuming, wasteful process. I suppose if you had nothing to do but sit by your computer all day it might not be so bad, but the whole notion of ‘auto transfers’ is a myth with this application.

How does this compare to the Windows version? Fortunately, the Windows Desktop version will transfer any number of shows, such as the 5 most recent, encode to whatever format you select, and keep the meta-data more or less intact. It will even let you specify where these files get saved to, so with Windows you can actually leave your computer running and have iPhone/iPod ready files in the morning. Unfortunately, the Windows version is not without its stability issues, as I have personally seen.

Conclusion
Part of what I think the designers missed in creating the Toast 10 Tivo features is that transferring video and encoding it, especially if you are trying to transfer HD programs, is an extremely time consuming process. The goal, in my opinion, should be to create software that allows the user to leave the application running and after a few hours have a finished, ready to use, format available to transfer to your portable device. Unfortunately, Toast 10 does not provide such a solution and has so many show-stopping features, I actually decided to return it.

As a side note, Toast 10 does advertise a number of other Tivo features such as Mac2Tivo and web streaming of Tivo files, but after having such a bitter taste with the basics of transferring files from a Tivo to an iPod/iPhone, I’m reluctant to try any more of this product’s “features”.

Snow Leopard Nightmare: 3rd times the Charm!

Posted on by
10

There’s been a growing number of users claiming have issues installing Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system that was released yesterday, and as I was one of those users, I thought I’d share my experience. I purchased the Family pack of Snow Leopard to install on 3 Mac’s in my home, all Intel-based, relatively new computers. Snow Leopard installed fine on two of the computers, but the third computer, an early 2009 Unibody MacBook, took all day. This is the story of that MacBook installation.

Attempt #1: The never-ending boot screen

First, I installed Snow Leopard over the existing 10.5 system and everything seemed to go fine. The MacBook finished the installation and afterward restarted. At which point the following screen “loading” appeared on reboot and stayed for over an hour:

I waited and I waited. Finally, I decided to shutdown and restart the computer only to see this screen again. I waited and I waited again, another hour passed, no change. At this point I decided to call Apple. I paid for AppleCare, after all.

The Apple Store was booked up for appointments for 4 days. The phone support was actually decent and they told me try a number of things such as resetting the PRAM (hold down command-option-p-r on bootup), pulling out the battery, etc. They also instructed me to boot from the install DVD and run Disk Utility to check for errors. Unfortunately, no errors on the hard drive came up. Even attempting to start in safe mode (hold shift on bootup) left me with the screen above. At this point the only logical choice that the AppleCare representative and I could think of was to boot off the install DVD and reinstall. So they wished me luck and we said our goodbyes.

Attempt #2: I don’t need no stinking input device

Since booting off the install DVD was possible, I ran the install again. Fast forward another hour, and the computer asked to be restarted at the end of installation. Holding my breadth, I pressed the restart the key. Patiently I waited as the previous “loading” appeared, but with some luck, it disappeared and the screen turned blue. Snow Leopard was finally starting! A prompt came up showing my username and asking for my password – it had saved my account settings! (my username, anyway) Then, as I moved my mouse toward the blinking cursor I noticed something odd. My mouse wouldn’t move. In fact, my keyboard was not responding either. Both the built-in MacBook keyboard and mouse were completely non-responsive.

Despite being tempted to throw the computer out a window, I went through the usual recovery ideas: plug in a USB mouse/keyboard, restart in safe mode, reset the PRAM, etc. None of them worked. The external USB devices were as inactive as the built-in ones. Safe mode had the same problem as regular mode, with no response from the built-in devices. Resetting the PRAM, even pulling the battery… no change.

At that point, I called AppleCare again. They were pleased that the ‘previous solution’ had ‘resolved’ the issue and requested I close the AppleCare incident and open a new one. Not really interested in their paperwork and increasing their ‘success’ statistics, I obliged. Since I was able to boot from the install DVD with an active keyboard and mouse, they determined it was not a hardware problem and it must be software.

The only solution they offered me, though, was to format the hard drive completely and reinstall a third time. I suggested doing one more installation on top of the existing system in order to preserve all of my settings, to which the representative responded, and I’ll never forget this, “Reformatting the drive is your best bet. Reinstalling a third time on the existing system is not likely to fix the issue, although I didn’t expect reinstalling a second time to do too much”.

Attempt #3: Success

Against the opinion of the AppleCare representative, I decided to do one more install off the DVD without formatting the hard drive. Before I’m ready to wipe a disc, I like to know I’ve accomplished all possible courses of action. And the result? All issues resolved. For whatever reason, Snow Leopard required 3 installations to work on this MacBook.

Aftermath: Ring! Ring! Doesn’t Apple know it’s 10pm?

While all this was going on, I detailed my experience as it happened on Apple’s Discussion Forum, hoping someone might have a good suggestion. As I saw in the responses, others experienced the infinite boot screen as well as the keyboard/mouse failures. Fast forward to 10pm later that night, when Apple representatives called me personally. Not so much to see how I was doing, but saying they had seen my posts on the forums and were eager to access my log and system files. While they had contacted a number of people with these types of issues, I was one of the few (perhaps only) one they could find who hadn’t yet formatted their harddrive. In other words, the logs were still fresh.

I offered up my install logs, somewhat truncated to the last install, in the hopes of isolating and resolving these issues for the community. But before I got off the phone with the representative, I did get one last laugh. I indicated that, had the third install failed, I planned to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. The reason being, “Well, if three install attempts failed, it’s never going to work”. He responded “I see no reason you could not keep reinstalling indefinitely!”. Apparently, Apple representatives have a lot more time on their hands than me.

UPDATE: It appears I am far from alone in having issues: Information Week: Snow Leopard Causes ‘Spinning Wheel Of Death’