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More Tivo Hacking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tons-of-juicy-nuggets-to-read dept.

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.

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. A solution for me (In New Brunswick) by xtal · · Score: 4

    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
  2. Re:TiVo runs linux? GPL violation? by disarray · · Score: 4
    Indeed it has been hashed and rehashed. The kernel modifications are here:

    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.

  3. Re:I hate to ask by Dr.+Sp0ng · · Score: 4

    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 :-)
    --