TiVo Hacking Book to be Released

weaknees writes "Wired News reports that O'Reilly press has book in the works loaded with TiVo Hacks. The author, an MIT guy, is collecting 100 hacks for TiVo, but is shying away from the most controversial hacks.... The brief article points out that the most avid TiVo hackers seem intent on respecting TiVo's interest in having hackers stay away from things like subscription theft and video extraction."

Comments

Re:Video Extraction (ReplayTV)

[crow]

On ReplayTV (with the 4000 and up models), there is a feature allowing you to send shows to other units, and another to stream video to another unit. Because the send show feature can go to any unit over the Internet, this is one feature that they're being sued over.

The hack portion of it is a bit of software you run on a computer that emulates the ReplayTV protocol, allowing you to send shows to and from a PC. This allows you to burn archival copies, as well as to effectively use the PC's hard drive for additional show storage. Running that software would be considered a "hack" as it was independently developed and not officially supported by ReplayTV.

Re:Video extraction?

[Eight 01]

You aren't very familiar with Tivo. They not only don't close hacking loopholes, but seem to even encourage them.
For instance, a hardware hacker created a NIC card for the first generation Tivo that allows you to telnet in and schedule recordings and do other things. TiVo included his driver in the latest release of the software that is automatically pushed to all Tivos, so that by changing the dialing prefix in the Tivo software it will use the NIC to obtain guide data (rather than the analog modem that is built in).

Furthermore, building a box that does the equivalent of the Tivo will cost in excess of $600 dollars (keep in mind that Tivo does high-quality buffering of all video, so it requires high-quality real time compression). A VIA CPU and an all-in-wonder TV tuner won't work.

You can get a lifetime subscription Tivo for hundreds less than building a Myth TV or FreeVo box.

Of course if building the box and fiddling with scripts is most of the fun, the FreeVo/MythTV box is the better deal :)

Re:video extraction

[Anonymous Coward]

TyStudio:

http://dvd-create.sourceforge.net/tystudio/index.s html

In short, TyStudio is a Tivo Video Recording (aka tystream) Format framework; TyStudio offers a suite of tools for these types of video streams. These tools enable you to transform the Tivo Video Recording to such formats as an MPEG program stream, which is commonly used by DVD players. It also offers the option of GOP boundary editong of the Recording prior to actualy doing the conversion. Pleas see the whatis/about page.

Re:Video extraction?

[ethaz]

Many of the common Tivo hacks (hard drive expansion, ethernet connections and web interface) are NOT opposed by Tivo. In fact, Tivo even includes support for ethernet connections in Series 1 machines, which do not have Tivo provided ethernet capability. (Series 2 machines have USB ports and can use USB ethernet adapters). To say that "something the company doesn't intend them to do and is adamantly against." is just flat out wrong and indicates that the writer is not at all familiar with Tivo.

There is a problem with video extraction in that it represents another battlefield in Big Media's attempt to turn back the clock to the days before Betamax. I wish Tivo would fight them on this but (1) Big Media owns pieces of Tivo and (2) we all can see what fighting Big Media did to Replay. I can hardly criticize Tivo for not wanting to commit suicide.

Re:30 Second Skip Questions

[greenskyx]

I agree... For those of you who don't know how to do this you can look here...

http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?po stid=205706#post205706

Tivo 2 ppl...
S-P-S-3-0-S (1.3, also 2.5, not 2.0 or 2.01) - Toggles 30 second skip mode. This turns the Skip to End button into a 30 second skip button. This was removed in 2.0x, but added back in 2.5.