TiVo has long been a popular Personal Video Recorder (PVR) for time shifting programmes, not to mention being popular among hackers trying to improve its capabilities such as to install larger hard drives, tweak its network capabilities and so on. However, up until now, the one main problem users had is converting its DRM protected into something else. For example, the TiVoToGo feature only works with Windows and supported devices, which meant users had to re-record recorded content into another format, a fairly tedious process that only works on Windows or using a video capture device, such as a DVD recorder.
According to PVRWire, hackers have succeeded in breaking the TiVoToGo DRM and have made a command line tool available that takes in a DRM protected TiVoToGo file and delivers a non-protected file. Unlike the DirectShow dumping method that works with Windows only, this tool can also run on Linux, Solaris and any other operating system the source is ported to. The project is also open source with the BSD License.
It is unclear how long this hack will work before the company behind TiVo releases an update, however due to various TiVoToGo products on the market, chances are that a DRM update to plug this hack will also require a an update for all these handhelds and the windows software. However, for now, it makes it easier to transfer recordings to DVD or non TiVoToGo video handhelds without using the tedious method of playing the TiVo out to a DVD recorder or using the slow DirectShow dump method.
