15 thoughts on “TiVo Hacking

  1. Woot!

    Mine should be shipping on Monday or so, I guess.. I can’t wait! Let me know if there are any snags you run into, as I’ll be going through the same process soon.

    To my surprise, since I had heard otherwise, the interface for my Tivo is still relatively snappy despite increasing the space just under tenfold.

    Joe: The 802.11b adapter would be cool, depending on your planned usage. I want to use my TurboNet to control it remotely, of course, but I also want to rip recordings off it for later use.. At best quality, and hour long recording is likely somewhere in the 3-4 GB range.. not something I wanna transfer over wireless.

    It is pretty cool tho :)

    1. Mine’s got a 40 gb drive in it, and it’s (Up to) 35 hours.. Minus 5 gigs for OS and reserved over-head, it’s about 1GB/hr, not 3-4. The DTivo I’ve got is slightly better compressed than the mpeg from the stand alones, but it shouldn’t be better by a factor of 4.

      Also, the TurboNet 10/100 card really can’t do much more than 10 mbps anyway… The breakout connector on the board is really a slightly modified version of an ISA bus electrically, and IIRC, that’s 16 bits @ 8 Mhz, so you’re only going to pull at most 16 MB/s off of it.

      1. it’s about 1GB/hr, not 3-4.

        Jeff was specifically referring to “Best” quality, which I am sure the default for someone with such large disks in their TiVo… =)

        As a point of reference, when making my “Good Eats” program archive, I have seen that on average, the video and audio for a 30-minute recording at “Better” (or whatever one step below “best” is called) quality is approximately 710M.

        a slightly modified version of an ISA bus electrically

        One good thing to note is that the new Series|2 TiVo’s have moved to a 200Mhz MIPS processor (which will give it more oomph) and they also have a real PCI bus onboard (although I don’t believe that the factory debug header is any different…)

        1. 35 hrs on mine is ‘best’ quality, there’s only one setting. Again, from your experience though, it looks like 1.5 GB/hr from your encoders, DirecTV’s get slightly better compression.

          The Series 2’s don’t have the factory debug header at all according to the autopsy 9thTee did… However, ethernet on those is as easy as plugging in a USB->Ethernet dongle.

      2. Sean covered where my 3-4GB/hour figure comes from, but I thought I’d address the ISA bus comment.

        Unless the disk controllers share the same bus, the ~16MB/s ISA bus limitation won’t be a problem.. as it’s 100Mb/s for 100Base-TX, not 100MB/s – which comes out to only be 12MB/s. Sure, full-throughput full-duplex transfers wouldn’t happen, but it’s not like I’m setting this up as a server.

        Also, IIRC, the edge connector isn’t a slightly modified ISA bus.. Rather, it’s pins routed out from the processor. The ISA implementation just happens to work well. There was discussion recently about using the edge connector (and jumping to some traces) to implement a PCI bus on the Tivo as well, but I don’t know how far that will end up going.

    2. Mine should be shipping on Monday or so, I guess.. I can’t wait! Let me know if there are any snags you run into, as I’ll be going through the same process soon.

      The only snags (more like snag-lets) I can think of were:

      • Not having the proper security bits to take the thing apart. I ended up using visegrips to remove the back-cover screws, but I was unable to do the same to remove the harddisk. So I just did some clever cable management and left the drive in the TiVo while still connecting it to my PC
      • Putting the TiVo back together before installing ftpd. I ended up taking the whole thing apart again just to correct this situation… I later realized that if i did a “mount -o remount,rw” and then used good ol’ Z-Modem I probably could have gotten the ftpd on there without taking it all apart again
      • I didn’t want to mangle the casing, so I routed the cable thru a small hole underneath the cooling fan.. I would prefer to have a jack on the back panel, but not enough to cut steel… :P
      1. Your tivo must be newer than mine.. I just had T10 and T15 normal torx screws, so a normal torx driver was enough. Or are you saying that you didn’t have torx drivers at all?

        At any rate, I wish I had copied all the tivonet software onto the drive before I put mine all back together so that installing the tivonet card was as easy as popping the lid, throwing it in there, and putting the lid back on.. but alas.

        What’s involved with getting it set up on the network before v3.0 comes out?

        1. Your tivo must be newer than mine.. I just had T10 and T15 normal torx screws, so a normal torx driver was enough. Or are you saying that you didn’t have torx drivers at all?

          I can’t remember if they were regular torx or security torx, but either way, i didn’t have drivers. :)

          What’s involved with getting it set up on the network before v3.0 comes out?

          Well, assuming you are talking about a turbonet card (and not a tivonet card like you mentioned in the previous paragraph), the instructions are here.. There are only a few steps pertinent to standalone tivos.

    1. It’s a 10/100M NIC for the TiVo. Now, when the TiVo “dials in” to update it’s program listings, it just does it over my broadband connection now (as opposed to dialing into their POP). In addition, i am now running the TiVo Web Project web server, which allows me to control almost all aspects of the TiVo from a web browser (including scheduling recordings, deleting shows, creating “season passes”, viewing listings, etc). Telnetting to an A/V appliance definately has some geek appeal to it (TiVo is linux based, and when you telnet to it you get a bash shell).

      It also allows you to use some other “hack” software to extract video/audio streams from the TiVo, which has allowed me to create my Good Eats episode archive encoded via DivX.

      1. Wow, very cool. Funny, all the talk about doing similar things with BeOS, both in audio and video appliances. It all would have bee possible in some imaginary future, with the industry in another vector… but it’s great to see some of those things actually happening somewhere.

        I brought up the Tivo subject at home recently… went over like a lead balloon. “You want to watch *more* TV? When?” Had to admit, it was a good question. But rather than more TV, I see it as an opportunity to only watch good TV, never have to surf around for something worth watching.

        1. But rather than more TV, I see it as an opportunity to only watch good TV, never have to surf around for something worth watching.

          That is the complete key… When you feel like watching TV, you have shows you enjoy there waiting for you. And don’t forget the next biggest advantage: skipping commercials… :) For shows like Battlebots, I skip the commercials, all the inter-match commentary and stuff and just watch the matches themselves… I take a 1 hour block of programming down to about 20 minutes… :P

          And the whole concept of TiVo Suggestions, where the TiVo picks shows it thinks you will like based on your viewing habits and your ratings of shows, is pretty cool… Sure, it picks some dogs at times, but it has also found some shows I enjoy…

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