I've been using Tivo Desktop for Windows for years and lately its become so buggy its barely usable anymore. Anytime they add a feature, 2 new things break. I was thinking of switching to Toast 10 on my Mac. Of primary interest to me is transferring TV shows to my iPhone for on-the-go viewing. I don't really care about streaming video since most of the time I am watching episodes, there is no internet available.

For people who've used both Tivo Desktop for Windows and Roxio Toast 10 for Mac, what kind of differences should I expect? In what ways is Toast 10 better? In what ways is Tivo Desktop for Windows better? Also, is the transfer/conversion process length still the same? For example, an hour (or so) to transfer a file to the Mac, then another hour (or so) to convert it to a smaller, iPod/iPhone format? Is it easy to automate transferring of episodes? One issue I noticed with Tivo Desktop is that it would constantly eat up memory and CPU bandwidth when I set it to automatically transfer shows, how does Toast 10 avoid this pitfall?

Although I have used TiVo Desktop for Windows, I spend most of my time using Toast. Among the differences of which I am aware one is Toast's support for El Gato's Turbo.264 which can improve the encoding speed dramatically (especially on slower computers)

Although TiVo Desktop for Windows is technically free. You'd still have to pay for the Plus upgrade as well as the burning software support -- which brings it close to the cost of getting Toast

- Bob