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PVRs Down Under?
mgkimsal2 asks: "My in-laws are leaving tomorrow for Australia and they've become quite fond of our Tivo. They asked if there was any way to get Tivo in Australia, but I'm turning up a blank. It seems that some people are hacking it to work over there, but it's not commercially available. Are there other PVRs commercially available in Australia? Similarly, are there any cool PVR products in other countries we've not seen in the US yet?"
You can bet that countries like Japan and Korea have gadgets which perform similar functions. They've got so many things we've never even heard of this side of the world - which is one of the reasons I intend to move there!
Problem is you probably won't turn up much online since the web pages and such will be in local languages.
I'd like to hear what information anybody has who's been living in those parts for a while.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
There are a number on non TiVo PVR's available in the UK a selelection of which can be found at pvruk . As some of these are non-subscription may be candidates.
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The very first PVR available in Canada was only released a few months ago, and it is tied to a specific satellite TV system. I would be very surprised if TiVo had a system that worked in Australia.
The annoying part is that all it would take to make a TiVo fully functional up here are the show listings. We use the exact same TV standards as the US. We even get some of the same channels. Yet after all these years, there still isn't TiVo or Replay support for Canada.
Buh.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Sony licensed the TiVo software, and has something sort of like TiVo but without the guide data in Japan. I think it is basically a little more than a digital VCR, which is too bad. I think the main problem with overseas markets is the guide data (what is on all the different channels), which can be difficult to get right (as anyone with a TiVo or Replay knows)
Twostep
There are 10 different types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I'm a fellow resident of Canberra, where Tridge (Andrew Tridgell) happens to reside when he is not jetsetting around the world with Quantum. At the last meeting of CLUG (Canberra Linux Users Group) someone brought along a UK Tivo to have a play around with. The hacking process was relatively simple and involved no breaking of the seal of the box. Basically you need a custom cable (9 pin serial to 3 pin standard stereo audio jack), and to hit enter a few times within 1 second of bootup. Then you pretty much follow a few of the instructions that can be found somewhere on samba.org (another post mentioned exactly where), and you reboot and get a linux shell. Tridge has reverse engineered the Tivo guide format and has scripts to convert on of the online tv-guides for aussie tv to Tivo format, but does not wish these scripts to be released in the public domain as it would most probably impact the subscription model in the states, leading to possible legal hassles for Tridge. In thory you could use this link to update the Tivo guide data every couple of days, but the even cooler method is to install a network card onto the box. Apparently all new Tivo's come with Tridge's drivers for the custom bus bridge so you should be able to just plug it in and start playing with it on the network. UK models have one other niggle, 5.5MHz vs 6MHz spread between voice and data, but as far as I remember this was changeable in the debug menus that first come up when you boot the Tivo. Moving away from Tivo, I do recall seeing ads for a PVR made by LG Electronics on TV recently, though I've not used or seen them, but they sound like a more consumer orientated solution, if nowhere as powerful as a Tivo. Anyway, it's probaly worth checking out samba.org and maybe clug.org.au (I think this site is currently being redev'd, but I can't remember the link for the propsed new site which might have more details about Tivo stuff, there should be a link in the mailing list archives though).