cTiVo is a free, open-source Mac application that pulls recorded shows off your TiVo DVR over your home network and converts them into standard video formats for offline viewing on any device.
What is cTiVo?
cTiVo is a free macOS utility that bridges the gap between your TiVo DVR and the rest of your digital life. It authenticates with your TiVo box on the local network, presents your entire Now Playing list, and lets you download individual episodes or entire series passes — automatically converting the proprietary TiVo transport stream into MP4, MKV, or a handful of other formats your Apple TV, iPhone, or Plex library will happily eat.
The project lives on GitHub under active community stewardship. It's the spiritual successor to the much-loved TiVo Desktop (which TiVo Inc. quietly abandoned), and for many long-time TiVo households it's simply irreplaceable.
What does cTiVo do best?
cTiVo excels at automated, hands-off archiving of your TiVo library. Set up a subscription — cTiVo's name for a persistent download rule — and every new episode of a show lands on your Mac automatically the next time the app is open and your TiVo is reachable. No babysitting required.
The conversion pipeline is powered by ffmpeg and tivodecode under the hood, which means format support is broad and quality loss is minimal. I've been running subscriptions for three shows simultaneously and the downloads queue, convert, and drop into a watched Plex folder without a single manual step. The queue management UI is spartan but functional — you can pause individual items, reprioritize, and see exactly where each download stands.
Commercial-skip metadata from Comskip can optionally be baked into the output, and chapter markers land in the converted file so you can jump past ads in any player that respects them. That alone puts cTiVo ahead of anything you'd cobble together with a generic download tool.
Is cTiVo free?
Yes — cTiVo is completely free to download and use, with no ads, no nag screens, and no premium tier. The source code is public on GitHub under an open-source licence, so you can audit exactly what it does with your recordings. The only cost is the media access key your TiVo account page supplies, which you paste in once during setup.
Who should use cTiVo?
cTiVo is purpose-built for TiVo owners who want to own their recordings — not rent them inside a proprietary box. If you have a TiVo Bolt, Roamio, or an older Series 3/4 unit on your network and you'd like those recordings to outlive the hardware, cTiVo is the tool. It also suits cord-cutters who kept their TiVo for OTA recordings and want to feed a Plex or Jellyfin library without manually transferring files.
It is emphatically not for novices expecting a polished consumer app. The setup requires digging up your Media Access Key, understanding that some cable-provider content carries copy-protection flags that block transfer, and a passing familiarity with video container formats. If those sentences made your eyes glaze over, you may find the experience frustrating.
Power users who've wrangled Handbrake presets and ffmpeg flags will feel right at home. The preferences panel exposes format, quality, naming templates, and destination folders with enough granularity to satisfy most workflows.
What are the best cTiVo alternatives?
The honest answer is that the alternatives are thin. kmttg (Java-based, cross-platform) is the closest feature-for-feature competitor and arguably more powerful for multi-TiVo households, but its UI is firmly in 2009. PyTiVo solves the opposite problem — pushing video to your TiVo rather than pulling off it. On the commercial side, VideoRedo and Tablo ecosystems serve similar archiving needs for over-the-air recordings but require different hardware entirely.
For pure video conversion without the TiVo integration, Handbrake and FFMPEG are the standard tools, but they obviously can't talk to your DVR. cTiVo's unique niche — native Mac app, automatic subscriptions, TiVo network discovery — has no direct replacement on macOS.
How does cTiVo compare to kmttg?
cTiVo wins on Mac-native experience: it integrates with macOS notifications, respects your Finder folder structure, and doesn't require a Java runtime. kmttg wins on raw configurability — it exposes more post-processing hooks and handles multi-TiVo fleet management better. For a single TiVo household on a Mac, cTiVo is the simpler, cleaner choice. For power users running three boxes and a custom NAS pipeline, kmttg's extra knobs may justify the uglier interface.
