Convert TivoToGo Files to Normal MPG for DVD Recording

Date Published: 01 March 2005

Convert TivoToGo Files to Normal MPG for DVD Recording

I’ve had a TiVo for a couple of years now and just recently installed the TiVo Desktop and TivoToGo software. I immediately ran into the problem that it’s impossible for me to burn shows to DVD without using Sonic’s software (I already have Nero so why should I buy something else?). Thankfully, there’s a lot of stuff available on Google including this popular article on TivoToGo MPEG2 Descrypting (which didn’t quite work for me) and this recent blog post on Converting .tivo to .mpg without Sonic.

So far… no luck. But hopefully I’ll edit this in a bit with something that works. At the moment everything seems to go fine but then when I try to open the resulting .mpg file, WMP10 starts to open it and then crashes.

Update 1: I found this link on WMP 10 Crashing with .tivo files and downloaded the K-Lite Codec Pack which includes a stripped down media player which did work. WMP 10 used to work for me when I first installed Tivo Desktop, so something I did after that (I installed a bunch of codecs and video-related tools in the course of trying to get this to work) probably killed it. Reinstalling Tivo Desktop didn’t fix it, but using the classic media player works for me for now.

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.