Category Archives: Technology

Toast 10 Review for Tivo Users

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About a year ago I wrote an article about transferring files from a Tivo to an iPod/iPhone using the Tivo Desktop software for Window. This year, I decided to try the Mac solution, which unlike the Windows solution requires a third party product, namely Roxi’s Toast 10 Titanium. Being familiar with the often buggy Windows software package, I picked up a copy of the Mac version expecting to be “Wow’ed” by the endless number of features listed and some reviewers who claimed Toast 10 would be my absolute best friend. What I discovered was another severely limited piece of software with a number of crippling, show-stopping features.

1. Dead on Arrival on Snow Leopard
First off, if you happened to upgrade to Snow Leopard, which now includes 18% of all Mac users, you’ll be surprised to learn Roxio’s Tivo Transfer fails to launch when you open it. Even though its been over a month since Snow Leopard was released, Roxio has yet to create an official replacement. Granted, they created a pre-release version available that you can download separately, but I’d feel safer had they released a stable version for the ever growing number of Snow Leopard users.

2. Auto-Transfer: 0 options
On the Windows version of the Tivo Desktop application, you can create an auto-transfer pass for a show, which often downloads the top 3 most recent episodes of a single show. On the Windows version, you have the option of configuring this to download more or less episodes of the show as you’d like. On the other hand, the Toast 10 version only allows you to download all of the episodes of a show, with no ability to restrict them. In fact, in one test I created an auto-transfer which automatically selected 30 episodes of a show, then removed half of the episodes in the download queue, only to have the software automatically recreate them. Apparently, it really wants to download 100% of the episodes of a show!

Without further ado, I present all the options for the Tivo Transfer service on a Mac:


3. Auto-Transferring to Portable Devices: 0 options
Transferring a file to a portable device involves taking the file downloaded from the Tivo and feeding it into Toast which can support a number of conversions. As a bonus, Toast added the ability to send downloaded files to Toast for conversion, which in turn get loaded into iTunes. Unfortunately, as may have noticed in the screenshot above, they lack the ability to set ‘which kind of portable device’.

This might not be so bad if the file that ended up in iTunes could be transferred to an iPhone/iPod, but for whatever reason, the m4v file produced by Toast 10 automatically was not iPhone compatible. In other words, even though you waited an hour for the file to transfer and another hour for the file to be converted for “a” portable device, you have to spend another hour re-encoding if you want to use it on your iPhone/iPod. On top of all of this, there’s no where to specify where the portable versions of the episodes go! They just get dropped into the Movies folder by default.

4. Destroying Meta-data is Not Cool
The previous two issues involved the auto-transfer option, which as I explain, is extremely limited. Now, let’s say you want to open Toast and convert the file to an iPhone format yourself. When you open a TV episode in Toast, all the information about the show is available and easy to read such as show name, episode name, etc. This information comes from the Tivo unaltered and is easy to read. For whatever reason, after you convert a show to an iTunes format (even if you select iPod/iPhone), the meta-data is extremely muddled. The series name now consists of the actual show name plus the episode, such as “Scrubs_My_Way_Home_WPIX_1018282”, which means iTunes is going to group every episode of a show as its own show. I’m not sure who wrote the meta-data mapping tool Toast 10 is relying on, but clearly this is not a well tested option as it requires you to open iTunes and fix all the episode information after every conversion.

5. Auto-Nothing
Despite Toast 10’s claim to support a large number of features, users have to spend hours at their computer to get a clean transfer. Consider the transfer of a single episode:

  1. Launch Tivo Transfer, wait 5 minutes for list of shows to populate
  2. Pick show to transfer, wait 30-60 minutes (or longer if your Tivo or Mac are wireless) to get the Tivo-encoded video
  3. If you have Tivo’s auto-export to Toast enabled, add 45 minutes for the conversion
  4. Re-encode file to work with your iPod/iPhone using Toast or iTunes adds another 45 minutes
  5. Open up iTunes and clean up meta-data about show, another few minutes

All and all, transferring a single show is an extremely time consuming, wasteful process. I suppose if you had nothing to do but sit by your computer all day it might not be so bad, but the whole notion of ‘auto transfers’ is a myth with this application.

How does this compare to the Windows version? Fortunately, the Windows Desktop version will transfer any number of shows, such as the 5 most recent, encode to whatever format you select, and keep the meta-data more or less intact. It will even let you specify where these files get saved to, so with Windows you can actually leave your computer running and have iPhone/iPod ready files in the morning. Unfortunately, the Windows version is not without its stability issues, as I have personally seen.

Conclusion
Part of what I think the designers missed in creating the Toast 10 Tivo features is that transferring video and encoding it, especially if you are trying to transfer HD programs, is an extremely time consuming process. The goal, in my opinion, should be to create software that allows the user to leave the application running and after a few hours have a finished, ready to use, format available to transfer to your portable device. Unfortunately, Toast 10 does not provide such a solution and has so many show-stopping features, I actually decided to return it.

As a side note, Toast 10 does advertise a number of other Tivo features such as Mac2Tivo and web streaming of Tivo files, but after having such a bitter taste with the basics of transferring files from a Tivo to an iPod/iPhone, I’m reluctant to try any more of this product’s “features”.

eclipse 3.5 – four good, 1 bad feature

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I’ve been using Eclipse 3.5 for a couple months now making it a good time to share the features that affected me the most – 4 good; 1 bad.

Getting started

Quick install with favorite plugins:

My Eclipse 3.4 workspace was starting to get corrupted making it a good time to make a clean break.  It wasn’t too time consuming to download/install Eclipse and create a new workspace.  I also installed the plugins I use regularly as I wanted them installed before switching to do development in the new workspace.
Sysdeo – For Tomcat with Eclipse.
Subclipse – For Subversion repository access.  The install of this one leaves something to be desired, but that’s not Eclipse’s fault.  it’s a license thing.
Ecl emma – For code coverage.
PMD – For static analysis.

Workspace setup:

1) Pulling in the source code from SVN is trivial.
2) I tweaked a few settings in the preferences.  I could create an epf file, but I hadn’t changed much in the old workspace.  This was a good opportunity to look at the new preferences in any case.
3) Then there’s the “what I need to do project” – it’s not committed to SVN (which is an accident waiting to happen) – but I have all the information in my gmail account or in my head.  The bulk of that project was a “todo.txt” file which I used to keep track of what tasks I wanted to work on for JavaRanch.  This file is now gone.  Which brings me to my favorite feature #1.

Features

Favorite feature #1 – Task Lists

This feature is awesome!  It replaced my “todo.txt” file for keeping track of stuff. (It’s different than //TODO or //FIXME because it isn’t necessarily tied to code.)  You can specify the status, a due date, categories and estimates.  I’m one of those organized types who likes keeping lists.  At work, I have a piece of paper I write on as I code with little things that come to mind, test cases I need to write, other tasks, etc.  At home, I was using the “todo.txt” file in Eclipse because I have less desk space than at work.  This makes the transition to an actual task list system a natural one and a pleasure.  I also started using gmail’s tasks around the same time.  They serve different purposes.  Eclipse for development.  Gmail for other things.  Did I mention I really like this feature?

Favorite feature #2 – “Open with”

When you use “open type” there is a drop down next to open that lets you choose the “open with” option.  This is really nice.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried using open type on a JSP to have it tell me my encryption settings aren’t correct.  I know the solution – open in a text editor – but that wasn’t the default before.  A minor annoyance, but nice to see it resolved.

Favorite feature #3 – Export/import JUnit results

Being able to send an XML file to co-workers about failing tests beats a screenshot.   Especially in terms of seeing the stack trace for “it works on my machine” type bugs.

Favorite feature #4 – Generate toString

This speaks for itself. And easy way to generate toString so it spits out all the fields is a nice time saver.

And the worst feature

Code formatting.  What happened?  This used to work intuitively and well in Eclipse 3.4.  In Java, it gets rid of my careful placed (for readability) whitespace between lines.  I checked the preferences and “number of empty lines to preserve” is set to one.  HTML is much worse.  If I format a bunch of lines containing one <input> per line, Eclipse turns this

<input type="hidden" name="action" value="moveAllSave" />
<input type="hidden" name="module" value="${moduleName}" />
<input type="hidden" name="source_forum_id" value="${sourceForumId}" />
<input type="hidden" name="log_type" value="0" />
<input type="hidden" name="log_description" value="bulk move from admin console">
into this
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="moveAllSave" /> <input
type="hidden" name="module" value="${moduleName}" /> <input
type="hidden" name="source_forum_id" value="${sourceForumId}" /> <input
type="hidden" name="log_type" value="0" /> <input type="hidden"
name="log_description" value="bulk move from admin console">

Huh?  That didn’t happen before.   I tried setting “never join lines” but it doesn’t take effect for HTML. I guess I’m not relying on the code formatting.  Unfortunate as it will slow things down.  But yuck.  Just look at it.

search – wolfram alpha going live – part 3

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I stopped watching the webcast (see part 2) about two hours in.  While WolframAlpha may go down over the weekend, it is up now for experimenting.  In part 1, I worried about my first impression:

What is interesting to me is that it gives you the answer, but not the source. For calculations, there isn’t really a source anyway. I don’t cite that 2+2=4. However, I do cite the population of Germany. So how are we supposed to know it is right? On the other hand, I think showing similar information you might not have asked for is cool.

Turns out this isn’t a big thing to worry about.  WolframAlpha gives you the source of it’s answer.  For example, I searched for swine flu.  It told me the scientific name along with the number of cases and deaths over the last couple of days.  In addition to a nice pop-up and PDF to export the data, it has a “source information” link at the bottom.  This shows the data set used to derive the answer along with other resources one might be interested in.

As a source for learning, I think this is pretty cool!