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Only a few days after the announcement that Tivo’s TivoToGo DRM had been cracked, to the good people over at Thebeneschs.com have posted their TivoDecode Manager, a simple Mac OS X interface which lets users connect to their Tivos wirelessly and download recordings to their computer. While the official TivoToGo software has made this functionality available to Windows users for a while now, Tivo never released a version for OS X.

The software is dead simple to set up and use. From the ReadMe:

You need to get your Media Access Key from the TiVo website (under Manage My Account). You can either manually type in an IP address for your TiVo, or your TiVos should be listed in the TiVos menu (via the Bonjour technology). When you click the Connect to TiVo button, a list of your shows should appear. Click the show you want to decode, and click the “Download & Decode” button. The resulting file should appear on your desktop.

That’s pretty much it… and I’m happy to report that it works like a charm. The only glitch at this point is that the downloaded videos won’t play in Quicktime, but VLC handles them with no problem. Or you can drop the videos into iSquint and encode them for your iPod and iTunes.

More good news is that the developer is still making improvements. A new release came out today that added a batch processing queue to allow for sequential downloads of multiple files, as well as several bug fixes. For all Mac-using Tivo owners out there, I would suggest grabbing this before Tivo tries to shut it down.

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