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?

[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 :)