+1 Geek Perseverance -1 Tivo Mac Support
My Tivo has the ability to stream music from my Mac to the Tivo so I can listen to my music through it. Kind of a goofy feature, but I still wanted to mess around with it. All I can say is that whoever does the Mac software at Tivo must just not have time to do it properly or they just don’t care. It won’t play unprotected AAC files, i.e., the default file format an imported CD is on iTunes.
Awesome.
However, by searching Google I found out that there is an unofficial feature where if you have Lame (swiss-army knife audio encoder/decoder) installed it will transcode the AACs into MP3s. So, I toddle off to Sourceforge and do the usual ./configure && make && sudo make install CLI-fu. Restart the Tivo Desktop software.
Hrm, the AACs are playing now, but coming out as white noise. More Google’ing reveals that the Tivo software, despite being a Universal Binary, i.e., can run on both PPC (big-endian) and x86 (little-endian) machines, expects the audio data to be big-endian, i.e., it would work better as a non-Universal Binary running under Rosetta.
To get around this abortion of a software bug:
- mv /usr/local/bin/lame /usr/local/bin/lame_orig
- sudo vim /usr/local/bin/lame
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/lame_orig -x $@
- chmod +x /usr/local/bin/lame
That tricks Tivo Desktop into byte-swapping the AAC audio data before transcoding and voilá, I can play (almost) anything in my iTunes collection on my Tivo!
I used the song Down by 311 as the test song, as I have on almost every piece of audio equipment I’ve ever owned. True story.
(Tip of the hat to Kathy Coop who I had to call to actually spell the word perseverance properly after spending about twenty minutes trying to get both the OS X and Google spell checkers to auto-correct my guesses.)
