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More Tivo Hacking
Logik writes: "It appears a bunch of guys over at http://www.geocities.com/tivohack/ have hacked the tivo to add a second hard drive. It appears they run Linux on a 50mhz PowerPC chip. They've even open sourced the kernel." Tons of great ways to void your warranty, and information about the guts. Also talks about how to add disk space.
(Huzzah!) I'm also hearing rumors of MP3 playing on the boxes as well.
You can get a lot of the functionality of the TiVo with an ATI All-In-Wonder, a reasonably fast celeron box, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a huge hard drive. Admittedly, the case doesn't look as nice, but I don't mind a tower sitting by the TV that much.
The ATI can be configured to download to a schedule, it's TV out lets you use the computer to browse/play games, you can play DVDs on it with a DVD drive with great quality, it has MPEG compression accelleration so you don't get old encoding stuff for later, and with the box, you can even play mp3's on your stereo (I center everything in the living room stereo wise).
This combination is much more flexible than the TiVo IMHO. The only downsides are that it doesn't work on linux, so you need windows (not that bad) and it doesn't look as nice as a system component (although if you got a bookshelf PC and pearl-painted it it would look pretty cool). I'm working on a couple things to make it more tivo like, I'd like to have a server so I could program it over the net, automatically record programs of choice, and maybe a client for the palm so that you could configure what to record on the fly.
..don't panic
cc
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb tivo/Forum6/HTML/000012.html
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/For um6/HTML/004947.html
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http://www.tivo.com/linux/
The rest of TiVo is userland--they can license in any way they desire, much like the packages included with Linux distributions.
This whole story should be marked Redundant.......
Tivo Hacking is nothing new, Slashdot it recycling old news articles, man - what is with this place lately?!
A quick search of "Tivo + Hacking" found the following on slashdot (the June 22nd article is nearly a duplicate of this current one) *sigh*:
More Tivo Hacking by CmdrTaco on Friday August 04, @08:45AM EDT
Hacking The Tivo by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 22, @09:37AM EDT
Tivo Hacking? by Cliff on Monday April 24, @09:32AM EDT
I own a Tivo and LOVE it! I did not really truely understand nor appreciate the full benefit and goodness a Tivo can provide until I owned one myself (for nearly a year now). I would not want to watch TV again without it.
Buy one (*buy from a place that has a money back guarantee - I think Tivo may have a 30 day MBG) and see for yourself.
For those of you who want to know more about Tivo go here:
http://www.tivo.com/
and here:
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi
You will find alot more useful information at these places than on /. [And that includes HACKING it]
Enjoy!
Firewire!
I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore. ...and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself. :)
:-)
Oh, come on. Surely it's worth $300 to be able to watch every episode of the Simpsons that's on on every channel every day, right?
I'm not kidding, either. It is worth it.
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There's more subtle things about the TiVo service that people don't necessarily know.
TiVo is random access. Those with VCRs are somewhat inured to the fact that they have to fast forward and rewind. With a TiVo, you have immediate access to the start of a show. Any show. You can delete them in any order.
What if the same episode is shown twice in one week? TiVo knows (having tagged each episode as unique) and records one. We see this with Xena all the time (now that we have TiVo, Rick is watching Xena again).
What if the show moves? On a VCR, you'd have to reprogram it. TiVo will still record the show (but there may be conflicts if you wanted to record two shows at once). Note that last-minute moves it won't know about, but if it's a scheduled move, it will.
For years, I wanted interactive television listings while surfing. Even when I had Primestar, I didn't have that. TiVo gives me that, even on an antenna-only connection.
ObDisclaimer: I work for TiVo.
_Deirdre
So could some karma whores post a few links or something?
:-)
:-)
I'm not a karma whore, but I'll post an explanation anyway (I don't know of any links).
A TiVo is basically a set-top box which downloads TV listings every night (at 3 am by default) and then records shows it thinks you'll like (or that you've told it to record). For example, if you tell it to record the Simpsons every night, it might realize that you like that type of show and start recording Futurama and Family Guy as well. You can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down for each show it records, and it uses your ratings to judge what shows to record in the future.
It's also useful for watching live TV, because it'll tell you a brief explanation of what episode of each show is on, so you can know if you've seen it and not have to wait to find out (and maybe even go out and do something better
I've fallen in love with these things - it's damn nice to be able to be out all evening and get home and be able to watch 3 episodes of the Simpsons and an episode of X-Files before bed
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I live in Canada where you can't buy a TiVo, and even if you could you couldn't get the service. I really love the TiVo concept -- never searching for a blank tape when you want to record something, never waiting around to find the start of a show. And that doesn't even mention what the service gets you -- automatic recording of your favourite shows without having to even know when they're on.
But unfortunately I can't buy a TiVo or get the service here. But maybe soon that won't matter. I can easily buy one in the US and bring it over. I'm pretty sure you can use it as a fancy VCR even if you don't have the service. I've considered doing this already. The main sticking point is the service.
Last time I talked to the TiVo rep who frequents all the discussion groups he said they had no plans to move into Canada. If they did I'd worry that a TiVo I bought in the US and brought over wouldn't work with the Canadian service once they introduce it here, but as it stands I guess that's not an issue.
So I might just go get one of these babies soon. But I wonder -- if you can get a BASH prompt on these things, modify the hard drive, and do everything else these guys currently do, how far are we from not needing the service? Ideally I'd like to exchange the modem in the box for an Ethernet card, add the TiVo to my home LAN, and let it use ClickTV for listings.
Now am I dreaming? Anybody think this is easy? Anybody think it's impossible?