TiVo Hacks

By Dale Farris, Secretary
Golden Triangle PC Club
September 2003

When the TiVo personal video recorder (PVR) first hit the market in 1999, TV viewers quickly learned a whole new way to watch their favorite programs. The TiVo device represents a sea change in television, far beyond what happened when VCR technology first began to develop.

In addition to its recording capabilities, TiVo will also let you control "live" TV, slip time, set up a television firewall, set up "season passes" to your favorite television series, integrate a high degree of technological intelligence in the device, set up wish lists, and record TV programs without videotape.

The TiVo device is actually a carefully tweaked desktop computer with a television tuner card. Instead of a Pentium or Athlon processor, the original TiVo is an IBM PowerPC 403GCX-based embedded system. It uses standard IDE hard drives, with custom MPEG-2 encoding/decoding hardware, a modem, and an infrared receiver. On the outside, it's running a Linux kernel. Everything the TiVo does, save the TV channel tuning and the video encoding, is done in software. Everything you see on the screen, all the interactivity through the remote and the recording schedule is all defined in code.

However, not all the TiVos are the same. The original TiVo, the Series 1, is the most hackable TiVo, a box thrown together with commodity parts. The TiVo code is running on open hardware. If you feel like it, you can throw the TiVo software out and just home brew your own code from the bottom up.

The Series 2 TiVo, the most commonly sold TiVo today, is not as open. To lock down the platform, TiVo, Inc. has started to add some "secrets" under the hood. While TiVo is not against people hacking their platform, they do have a media service to run, and they don't want people to freely play around with some of the stuff they intend to make money on down the road.

With the prevalence of TiVo devices, it is little wonder that we see an equally strong interest in finding ways to hack, or modify the device. The most common community of TiVo hackers on the Internet can be found at www.tivocommunity.com. Author Krikorian has assembled some of the more useful, interesting, and cool hacks found in this community, as well as on his own.

There are hardware hacks, requiring you to pop the top off your TiVo and fiddle about with the innards. There are also software hacks, requiring a little less manual dexterity but no less of a sense of adventure. And, for the faint of heart, there are remote control hacks you can do from the comfort of your favorite armchair.

There are also 2 types of hacks you will NOT find here. The first are those that circumvent having to pay for TiVo. There are a few open source projects out there, like MythTV that do the same things the TiVo does, but you don't have to pay a monthly fee or a single lifetime fee to get to use it. Instead, this service queries the Internet for those valuable tidbits of information on when and what channel your television shows are on.

The second type of hacks you will NOT see involve getting to the software insides of that new and shiny Series 2 box. Most TiVo hacking has been and continues to be done on the older and more open Series 1 box. There are those who have managed to gain access to the internals of the Series 2 box, opening it up to many of the hacks available to the Series 1 box. Unfortunately, these go beyond the scope of this book, are tricky, and are of questionable legality. Series 2 owners wishing to go beyond the remote control hacks and hard drive upgrades will most likely find newer hacks for Series 2 boxes appearing online over time.

Be sure you are aware of the clearly worded warranty statement when you get your TiVo -- "Do not open or you will void your warranty." If you open your TiVo, you will not be able to send your TiVo to TiVo, Inc., if a problem later develops. If this is of little concern to you, then by all means, open this marvelous book, open your TiVo, and start exploring these 100 tips and tricks to hacking your TiVo.

Summary of Table of Contents

The 100 TiVo hacks are organized into 7 chapters, including the following:

1 - TiVo Remote Control Hacks
2 - Adding More Hours
3 - The TiVo Shell
4 - Bring the Internet to TiVo
5 - TiVo and the Web
6 - Working with Videos
7 - Writing Code

Key Topics Covered

TiVo Hacks give users personalized control of their TiVo. This book explains how to:

Use your remote control to activate the 30-second skip to blaze through commercials, enable advanced wishlists, push fast-forward to the limit, and open the backdoor to further hacks

Upgrade your TiVo's hard drive for all the recording time you want

Log in to the TiVo command line for access to programming data

Display caller-ID on your television, present digital slide shows, and play MP3s

Use TiVo on your home network to schedule recordings, access lists of recorded shows, and display your preferred programming on your web site

Write your own TiVo programs in Tcl and C

Access TiVo's Media Filesystem for programmatic access to show details - actors, directors, Thumbs-Up ratings, and more

Book Contents

280 pages; preface; figures; tables; tips; index; cover colophon

Author

Raffi Krikorian

About the Author

Raffi Krikorian is an unapologetic TiVo lover and digital plumber. If you look hard enough, you can usually find him putting together a hack for some random and stray idea that sidetracked him from the last project or stray idea. He freely admits that his serious television addiction is probably getting between him and his goal of finally graduating from MIT for the second time, although he claims it's getting better. When he's not studying or watching TV, you can find him wandering around or trying something new. In whatever time is left, he tends to his wasted bits on his weblog, www.bitwaste.com/wasted-bits.

ISBN

August 2003 First Edition
0-596-00553-9

List Price

$24.95
$38.95 CAN

Publisher

O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
101 Morris Street
Sebastopol, California 95472
1-800-998-9938
1-707-820-0515
FAX 1-707-829-0104
www.oreilly.com