TiVo files are saved by digital video recorders in their proprietary format with copyright protection, so it's technically impossible to play recorded TV programs on other players without format conversion. I often record some wonderful parts of TV shows while watching them with my TiVo HD DVR. I guess you guys may do the same thing as I do. Recording is easy, but playing these TiVo files on some portable devices is totally unavailable due to the copyright and format issues.
Because of this, I have to look for a video converter to do format conversion. After tested approximately 10 products, I finally purchased Pavtube Video Converter. The reason that I chose it is that among all the products I’ve tried, it is the only one that worked well on my Windows 7 64bit, and consistently synchronized audio and video channels correctly, while other programs always have problems one or another, like giving me error messages time and time again, or only have audios in the resulted files. Pavtube does not have these issues, so it won my appreciation. I would like to share my own experience on how to using it to convert TiVo files to other video formats, like MP4, WMV, AVI, FLV, etc. in this post.
Requirements:
1. TiVo Desktop
2. Pavtube Video Converter
First of all, you should transfer your recorded files which you want to convert to other formats from your TiVo box to your personal PC via TiVo Desktop.
Open TiVo Desktop, click "Pick Recordings to Transfer" to transfer TV shows to your PC. The TiVo Desktop will prompt when the transfer is finished.
Then do as the following instruction shown:
Step 1: Run Pavtube Video Converter, and import TiVo files to it
Once you run this program, you will see the main interface as below. You are allowed to click "Add" button to load TiVo files into this utility.
Step 2: Select output format and set save path
Click the drop-down list of "Format" to select an output format according to your end use of the output files: add to iPhone for playback, you can select MP4 or MOV; import to BlackBerry for entertainment, you can choose AVI, WMV, or MP4; insert to PPT for presentation, you can select WMV or MPG; upload to your personal blogs or video-sharing website, you can select FLV, etc. All in all, you can choose whatever format as you like. Here I choose the .mp4 format for my PS3 as an example.
Meanwhile, you can click the folder icon at the end of "Output" to specify where to locate the output files. If you want to combine all the TiVo files you added into this program to be as a single file, you can tick the checkbox "Merge into one file".
Step 3: Set advanced settings
If you want to adjust the audio and video parameters of your TiVo files, you can click "Settings" button to do it. The following pop-up window allows you to change codec, the figures of bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, etc. so that you can do advanced settings according to your own requirements. Generally speaking, the larger figures generate larger file size but better quality; the smaller values produce smaller file size but inferior image quality. If you are not good at this step, you can totally skip it.
Step 4: Convert
As soon as the above mentioned steps are finished, you can click "Convert" button to start conversion, and the output files can be found via click "Open" button after conversion task is done.
Well, again, my pleasure to share my own experience here, hope it is helpful.