kmttg vs TiVo Desktop

KMTTG ADVANTAGES

Viewing TiVo Listings

• Uses tabs to easily switch between viewing of listings for all your networked TiVos.
• Can choose to display listings with or without folders.
• Does not require re-download of listings when switching views.
• Can decide when to refresh listings for each TiVo.
• Listings contain information about bit rate for each show.
• Ability to view detailed Disk Usage information as a pie chart along with a summary of bit rate information per channel.

Better download capabilities

• For Premiere units kmttg offers option to download TiVo files in mpeg2 Transport Stream (TS) container which TiVo Desktop currently does not offer. Downloading in TS format offers significant speedup over the traditional Program Stream (PS) container.
• kmttg will automatically retry downloads that sometimes may fail due to transient TiVo web server issues. The number of download attempts and wait period between retry attempts are configurable.
• Displays download rates in Megabits per Second (Mbps).

Auto Transfers

• Can automatically pull files from all networked TiVos as background service using flexible title and/or keyword based matching.
• Ability to use regex expressions in setting up title matching such that for example you can pull all recordings from your TiVos.
• Can limit transfers to be from particular TiVos.
• Can use various exclusion or inclusion filters.

Encoding to different formats

• Along with several built in encoding profiles allows user to define own custom encoding profiles or modify existing ones.
• Can use optional VideoRedo integration to avoid A/V sync issues in resulting encodings that often happen when downloading shows from Series 3 TiVos.
• Tight integration with VideoRedo TVSuite4 allows use of VideoRedo encoding profiles along with custom and built in ffmpeg/handbrake/mencoder ones.

Extra capabilities

• Integration with commercial detection and cutting tools.
• Can generate closed captions (.srt) files.
• Close integration with pyTivo - can generate metadata files and push files automatically back to TiVos.
• Can define your own custom commands/scripts.

File Naming

• Full control over file naming conventions and with ability to define sub-folders for series.

VideoRedo Integration

• Has optional tight integration with VideoRedo for QuickStream fix, commercial detection and commercial cutting.
• For VideoRedo TVSuite4 has option to use VideoRedo encoding profiles alongside ffmpeg/handbrake/mencoder custom and built in profiles.

Cross Platform support

• Runs on Windows, Mac or Linux (though some capabilities and 3rd party tools not available on Mac and Linux platforms).

Open Source

• All source code openly available.

KMTTG DISADVANTAGES

• Requires separate solution for Go Back functionality, though integrates well when used in combination with pyTivo.
• Initial configuration and installation is a little harder.