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”.

All Digital Soda Machine

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I have to wonder, was there really a need to an invent an all-digital touchscreen soda machine? Even if there was, the following screenshot taken from a local mall offers very little solace to the thirsty consumer:


“head first” style aria

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I attempted to give a Head First style speech at the Toastmasters humorous speech competition. As a moderator at JavaRanch, it seemed fitting to put a transcript of one iteration online. While it changes a bit each time I give it, this is the idea.. Shown here with a bit of organization.

This was given to a largely non-technical audience.   For the more technical readers here, ARIA actually has four levels: off, polite, assertive and rude.  This article on ARIA is an excellent read.  My audience tells me the concepts were memorable and the speech was funny.  So I guess I accomplished my goal.  I did win at my club and get to go on to the next level.  Which gives me the chance to give this speech in front of people I don’t know.

You no longer have to imagine the sock puppets :).  I had two – one for the browser and one (with glasses) for the screenreader.
screenreader puppet

Anyway, here we go:

Introduction
Me: When you think of technology, do you think of humor?  I do.  My goal is to teach you about a technical topic called ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications.  Boring?  Just you wait.  I brought sock puppets.

Welcome the characters
Me: We all know what a browser is.  We use it every day to browse the web.  I’ll let you imagine that this sock puppet is IE 7.  You may not know what a screenreader is.  Imagine you can’t see the screen.  What does our browser friend here look like?  Well, the screenreader reads the words in the browser to you.  The glasses remind us of reading so it will be easy to remember that this guy is the screenreader.  Lets listen in on how things worked up until now.

Scenario 1 – Before ARIA
Browser: I’m IE 7.  Who are you?
Screenreader: I’m a screenreader product called Jaws.
Browser: Ah!  A shark!  And I can’t see my users!  A shark ate my users!
Screenreader: Stop being so dramatic.  Your user is write here – safe and sound.  I help your user.
Browser: My user is just find without your help.
Screenreader: Want to be IE 7?  Watch what happens when a blind or vision impaired users tries to fill out a form without a standard called ARIA.
Browser: I’ll set the scene.  It was a dark and stormy night.
Screenreader: Get on with it.  I can’t read to the user until you get around to rendering the page.
Browser: Fine.  Here’s your page.
Screenreader: Ok.  User? I’ve got some questions on a form for you.  <hum as they go back and forth>
Browser: Uh oh.  The user entered a bad country.  I know because I checked with the website while the user was filling out the form.  I know!  I’ll put a big red message on the screen.  Surely the user will see that.
Screenreader: <back to humming>.  Submit.  My masterpiece.  All done now – time for a nap.
Browser: Wait a minute!  The country is still invalid.  Jaws – can sharks swim with their eyes close?  You’re falling asleep on the job.  I told you there was a message.
Screenreader: Did not!  You place a secret message and didn’t tell me it was there.  That’s like putting a note in a dictionary in a basement in Europe and claiming I should have seen it.
Browser/ Screenreader: Did not!  Did too!  Did not!  Did too!

Me: All right guys. Break it up.  Luckily this is a thing of the past.  Let’s upgrade to IE 8 and see how it looks now.  Ready IE 8?

Scenario 2 – Urgent Message with ARIA
Browser: Yes!  I’m all bright, shiny, new and upgraded.  My father was IE 7.  Parents are so backwards!  I’ll set the scene.  It was a dark and stormy night.
Screenreader: Just like you father.  Get on with it.
Browser: Where’s the fire?  Here’s your page.
Screenreader: <hum to user while fill out form>
Browser:  Uh oh.  The website says we can’t ship a book to North Korea.  I know!  I’ll set the rude ARIA property to tell the user.
Screenreader: I see the rube property is set.  The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!  I must tell the king, I mean the user.  User – Abort!  Abort! Urgent message – no books can go to North Korea.
Screenreader: Browser, that was a close one.  But we save the day – and the user – thanks to ARIA.  Remember what that stands for?
Browser: Yeah.  Accessible rich internet applications.  Accessible.  That would be you screenreader – reading to the user.  Internet Application.  That’s a website where we can fill out forms.  And rich.  That must mean the website has a pot o’gold.
Screenreader: Not quite.  Rich means dynamic and interactive.  Like gmail.  You can do things without reloading the whole page.

Interlude
Me: As you can see, IE 8 support is much better than IE 7.  But does this mean we have to interrupt the user for ever little thing.  Seems distracting.  T-O-P- Wait!  I have something unimportant to tell you. !  Let’s watch.  Browser?

Scenario 3 – Informational Message with ARIA
Browser: I’ll set the scene.  It was a dark and stormy night.
Screenreader:Oh for crying out loud!  Can’t we skip that prt?
Browser: Fine.  Here’s your page already.
Screenreader: <hum while fill out form>
Browser: Hmm.  The website says that city and zip code don’t match.  Probably a typo, but I should tell the user.  I’ll set the polite ARIA property.
Screenreader: Interesting.  I see the polite property has a message.  I’ll wait for a good time to tell the user.  <hum more>.  Perfect.  User, while you are between fields, can you check this?  Oh, it’s wrong?  I see.  Good, we get to fix our mistake.
Browser: That was nice and polite of you.

Conclusion
You came to hear  a funny speech.  You learned what ARIA – accessible rich internet applications are all about.  Without even feeling like you were learning.  My motivation for doing this was the Head First series of books which often teaches through humor, dialog and personification.  Remember ARIA may be rude or polite, but always helpful.  Just like Head First.

[edited to add sock puppet picture]