We’re happy to announce the beta release of our first software product, TVHarmony AutoPilot which can be freely downloaded here. The software automates downloading and converting TivoToGo files into popular formats such as MPEG and Playstation Portable (PSP) compatible formats. In addition, you can download the conversion utilities separately.

We believe we made a good tradeoff between allowing users to legitimately convert their Tivo content into standard formats but still urge people not to violate copyright laws by publicly distributing the shows on the web. When the software converts programming, it imprints their Tivo Media Access Key as a watermark in the lower right hand side of the movie. Since the Media Access Key can easily tracked back to an individual Tivo owner, users will be more reluctant to post copyrighted content on the web.

The Beta 1 release still needs some polish and we have plans for many more features, but at this point, it provides enough functionality to be useful. If you ever wanted to move Tivo content to your PSP or other media player that supports MPEG, AutoPilot is an easy way to automate the process. With the new functionality to upload MPEG files back to your Tivo, you can also use your home PC as a storage system for content you haven’t had time to watch.

Feel free to download the software here and please contribute your ideas to our forum.

Sample Watermark

We’re finally back from vacation after a few fantastic days in Costa Rica away from the computer. Thanks for your patience during our break.

I’ll be taking a much needed vacation to Costa Rica this upcoming week so there won’t be any new posts until I return May 15th. Until then, feel free to peruse the high quality links on the left of the site.

It looks like we’ve managed to move the website and recover all our old data. If you run into any problems or find the site slower than before, please send us an email so we can correct the problem.

We still have some work to do on the product tracker but we’re completely revamping it to support xml and other goodies, so for the time being it has been removed from the site. It should go back up in the near future when we have time to complete the changes.

Thanks again for your continued patience and support.

We’ve turned our comments back on, hopefully changing the system enough to fool all but the most motivated spammers. Users will now be required to type in a number when they comment in a new field of the form. For instance, the field may say “Type five hundred, twenty five” and you’ll need to type “525″ into the field. While not rocket science, hopefuly it is just enough trouble to do programmatically that spam-bots out there won’t change their code to handle it.

Sorry for the inconvenience while the system was down and we always encourage everyone to post comments and questions.

We’re back in town and ready to get back to work on the blog. I want to say a personal thank you for all the kind emails that were sent over the last couple weeks. It was very much appreciated. Thank you.

Posting will return to normal this weekend. Sorry for the continued delays and lack of posting.

Unfortunately, we’ve had an unexpected death in our family so I’ll be traveling over the next 4 or 5 days. As would be expected, posting will be light during the interim.

We’ve been getting hit hard by comment spammers so until we come up with a fix to prevent spam, we’re going to turn off comments. We think comments are big a great part of this site, and rest assured, we’ll be turning them back on once we come up with a solution to the problem.

If any of our readers happen to practice voodoo, please stick a few needles in your spam dolls for us.

This has nothing to do with home entertainment, but we’ve got some free google GMail accounts if people are interested in trying it. They are relatively easy to get these days and I’m sure the “public beta” phase will soon expire opening the door for anyone to get a free account on their own, but if you are interested in getting one in the meantime, send us an email (tvharmony @ gmail.com) and we’ll gladly send you a free invite.

There’s a limited number of free invites, but hopefully enough to satisfy any of our readers who don’t already have a gmail account and would be interested in getting one.