TiVo Desktop (free) Alternatives
TiVo Desktop (free) is described as 'TiVo Desktop software works with your network-connected TiVo box, your Mac and your PC' and is an app. There are five alternatives to TiVo Desktop (free) for Mac, Windows and Linux. The best alternative is pyTivo, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like TiVo Desktop (free) are cTiVo, KMTTG, pyTivoX and iTiVo.
pyTivo is both an HMO and GoBack server. Similar to TiVo Desktop, pyTivo loads many standard video compression codecs and outputs mpeg2 (or in some cases, h.264) video to the TiVo. However, pyTivo is able to load many more file types than TiVo Desktop.