TiVo Hacks

by Raffi Krikorian

Book Overview

"TiVo Hacks" helps you get the most out of your TiVo personal video recorder. Armed with just a screwdriver and basic understanding of PC hardware (or willingness to learn), preeminent hackability... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596005539
• ISBN13: 9780596005535
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Serious hackers only need apply

The majority of the book is working the TiVo at the operating system level to alter the software or to transfer movies. This is advanced stuff that requires a good deal of technical skill. The first chapter of the book does have some hacks that are done from the interface itself, like enabling the advanced season pass. The second chapter covers adding more disk space to your TiVo. Then beyond that you get into the advanced topics; putting your TiVo on your network, changing the software, transferring movies around, and then authoring code for the TiVo. The book is very focused. The text is well written and the graphics are used effectively. The section on adding disk space is very well done and is better than anything I have read on the web for doing the same type of work. I recommend this book for people who are familiar with Linux and hardware hacking and are interested in extending their TiVos. For just the average TiVo user you may want to review the table of contents to make sure that you are getting enough out of your purchase.

Nicely organized and easy to read

I have not read the other tivo books yet, but I think this one is pretty good. Yes, you can get all the information online from the forums, but this book does a nice job of organizing it all in one place that you can flip through in your leisure. I found the pictures helpful too. The other reviewers seemed a bit harsh on this book, but maybe since I borrowed it from the library, I'm a bit more forgiving.

An Open, Extensible Tivo For the Tinkerer

Did you see the September 2003 Forbes magazine, with a Tivo on the cover? The folks at Tivo must have been pleased! So too might you, if you have a Tivo or are thinking of getting one. The article said that in the field of Digital Video Recorders, Tivo is the dominant one. [Though the article also said that the competition is increasing.]As far as this book is concerned, that article is reassuring. It says a Tivo is your safest choice of DVR; independent validation of the book's topic. Now considering the book itself, it is easily readable. Much more so than your typical instruction manual that comes with a software package, and usually feels like it was written as an afterthought. (As it probably was.)The copious diagrams in the book of the screen captures of software, and of the hardware, greatly help the understandability. Essentially, the book appeals to the tinkerer of either software or hardware. It gives you an appreciation of how open the product is, either explicitly by its manufacturer, or, perhaps more importantly, by the vast user community that has arisen around it.

A super "hacke" guide to getting the most out of your TiVo

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

Best Tivo Hacks Source

This is an awesome book, plain and simple. I have read many articles on hacking the Tivo, but this book is by far the best written on the topic. Just by flipping through the book, you are able to pick something out and do it with minimal effort and mental taxation. It is very nicely laid out, and very easy to understand.On thing that TiVo Hacks does a great job doing is explaining 100 cool things that you can do with your TiVo both outside the box and under the cover. Some of the things can even be done just by using your remote control! I have found many of the hacks on the Internet, but there were many more items in the book than I had found in my online searches. For instance, the book explains how to do the 30 second skip, add more space to your TiVo for longer recording, create a web interface, and activate on-screen caller ID!However, there is one thing I wish this book had incorporated. In case you didn't know, there are two different series of TiVo's in existence: Series 1 and Series 2. I have a DirecTV TiVo, which is not a normal TiVo. I know that there are some differences between it and a normal TiVo, but I am not sure what they are. I was hoping that the writers would spend some time talking about the different variations, but there was nothing in the book touching on the subject.Taking it all in, I would recommend this book to anyone with a TiVo. The numerous hacks it describes are great at stretching the TiVo's abilities. The remote control hacks alone are fun, cool, and very handy to have, even if you never plan on taking the cover off. This alone makes the book valuable to even the casual TiVo user.