It’s taken me almost an entire year to do, but I’ve finally succeeded in taking a 2 1/2 hour movie off my TiVo and burning it to DVD using iMovie and iDVD. Every other person I know that’s done something like this has been forced to use one of Apple’s pro-level apps, but since I neither own, nor have any real desire to learn to use any of those, that wasn’t an option for me.
So instead, I labored to find a solution, and can now actually say that I’ve figured it out. Of course, iDVD has a really annoying 2 hour limitation, so I needed to split the movie in two and burn it to two separate discs…but it’s worth it.
While I’ve long known how to do it using Toast, that was a bare-bones affair. Because I used iDVD, I was able to include the easy-to-make custom tracks and menus, and anything less to me wouldn’t have felt right.
Ahh…I rule.
If I’m feeling ambitious, I might post a tutorial on how to do it one of these days. It’s a bit complicated and convoluted, but once you get the hang of the process it becomes second nature.
http://tivo.samba.org/index.cgi?req=all
That is probably useful. For example, it explains how you can transfer files to/from the TiVo to your *nix box with rsync, or even install a non-DMA ISA network card (TiVO has no DMA support).
I’ve long hacked my TiVo with all that stuff. It’s got a network card, a web server, telnet, FTP, bash…tons of useful stuff.
It’s what to do with the MPEG2 files once you’ve ripped ‘em off the TiVo that’s the hard part.
But I’ve mastered that now. :)