Here are some things I have observed after a couple days of using the second beta release of TiVo Transfer. TiVo Transfer BETA 2 is installed on a MacBook Pro (late 2008 - solid aluminum body) running current Snow Leopard (10.6.1), and my TiVo is a dual cable card TiVo HD, cable provider is Wide Open West (WOW) in the northwest Chicago suburbs.

1- This version is more stable than the first BETA. The first one crashed every few hours of use - BETA 2 still crashes occasionally but not as often

2- The console.app shows that BETA2 is refreshing the list of shows on my TiVo every minute. I have a lot of shows, and so this means my console.app tail of the console log includes the fact that the process (tivo transfer process ID) has exceeded more than 500 messages per second and some of the messages are dropped. In this log there are frequent duplicate entries. This could be due to the fact this this is a beta, not sure if this happened with the old TiVo Transfer app. Every minute does seem more frequent than necessary, though. When BETA 2 is refreshing the list of shows, the spinner on the Active Transfers line stops.

3- BETA2 shows only the first 128 shows. Also reported for BETA 1

4- After transfer to my Mac the TiVo Transfer does not close the file properly. Symptom is that if you try to move the .TiVo file to another file system (for example, a USB drive mounted on my Time Capsule router) the move operation will error out when the move routine tries to remove the original, saying that the original file is still in use. You can COPY the file to the other drive, but not MOVE it. After you copy it, you can move it to the local trash, but you cannot empty the trash because the file is still in use. If the TiVo Transfer app is closed or crashes, the file handle is released and you can then empty the trash successfully.

5- The format column contains no data on the DVR listing. The channel column always contains "n/a" on the TiVo Recordings listing.

6- When BETA 2 is set to transfer TiVo recordings to Toast (Toast 10.02 Titanium) and Toast has been configured to automatically convert these files and store the output file in iTunes, the meta-data (program description) is missing and replaced with the length in the Description field, and the episode/show name is replaced with the file name of the transferred TiVo file. This includes a Unix-style timestamp. This bus was also noted in BETA 1 and in the old version of TiVo Transfer. This copy of BETA 2 is sending files to Toast 10.02 Titanium, which is actually doing the conversion, so this issue might be in the Toast application and not specifically TiVo Transfer BETA2.

7- Shows recorded as TiVo Suggestions do not appear in the DVR list of programs unless you modify the "Keep Until" setting on the show. Not sure if this has to do with the keep until date or the last modified time of the file.

8- Some programs transmitted on Chicago area "Me" channel, specifically old Bob Newhart and Get Smart episodes, transfer only the first 0.5-1.5 megabytes of the show and stop. This is WWMECA, channel 19 on WOW cable. ME TV is also on WOW cable channel 171, and shows on that channel record and transfer OK. All the other channels seem to work as expected, but perhaps there is something specific to this combination that doesn't work.

More as it happens :-)

Doug

Occasional crash should be fixed in next build.

EDIT: Can I get the crashlog posted please? Dev wants to make sure this is the same crash we're tracking.
EDIT2: Got the crashlog, thanks! This crash is only in the beta build, related to the immense amount of logging we generate in the Console. We're removing this for the next build.



EDIT: this logging only occurs in development builds and not the release version, we're double checking on the time of queries just in case.



Forwarded to dev... on a side note that would be annoying.



Forwarded to dev...

EDIT: Fixed in next build



This is an issue with the actual data in the .TiVo files, you saw the same thing in the original 1.x version if I recall correctly. This is unlikely to change for the near future.



Unrelated to TiVo Transfer itself, would be a Toast bug. I know this is on the list but I'm unsure if it will be fixed by the Snow Leopard updaters.



All suggestions do not appear until you change? I'm not seeing this....

EDIT: TiVo HD on Comcast with cable card, I just went and checked and I have 13 suggestions at the moment, all show up correctly. It might be because I'm not at 128 shows.



This is an interesting one, does the TiVo Transfer 1.x version have the same issue with the same shows?

Uh... can't start TiVo Transfer version 1 under Snow Leopard. Kinda how we got started in all this. So.. I dunno :-)

EDIT: sent you the crash log in PM, let me know if you want it posted here for bug tracking.
IDEA: Subscribe to a couple of internet feeds like the NY Times or Onion News Network to get your count of shows above 128 quickly. The missing TiVo suggestions might just be due to the fact that they are at the end of the list and the list is truncated.

New item:

9- When a show for which there is an auto transfer enabled starts recording on the TiVo, BETA2 drops a small 4kb file into the TiVo Recordings directory. If all the pending transfer shows are completely transferred before the new show is fully recorded, the show is never transferred and the 4kb file is left behind. I found three of these this morning with timestamps of just a minute or two after the start of the show (possibly side effect of the frequent refresh). I think this only happens when the auto-transfer show is the only thing in the transfer queue. If there are longer transfers in progress (for example an HDNET movie) and the new show is shorter than the time it takes to transfer the movie, the new show is transferred successfully after the movie completes. Will try to send you a smple of one of these files in PM.

10- This is more of a suggestion, really: special characters like a colon are replaced by a forward slash in BETA2's filenames. Since the forward slash is also a directory separator in Unix-style path names, this is probably not a good idea. Getting the special characters out of anything that could ever appear on a command line is a very safe thing to do, but the Transfer 1 behavior of replacing these with an underscore is a better behavior.

Doug

9 should be resolved in the next build... and I hope 10.

-p