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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."
What's wrong with video extraction is that it would expose TiVo to the ReplayTV-like lawsuits from the media industry.
TiVo tries to be all things to all people, being cozy with both the media industy and users who want to control their TVs at the same time. It's quite a tight rope to walk...
Not to mention by the time the book hits the shelves all the "hacks" will probably be patched by TiVo and you're left with basically an obsolete historical look at TiVo hacking. Should be a good book to alert the TiVo management to fixing bugs in their OS that let you hack it. I'm continually amazed that people continue to buy these things with the intent to modify them to do something the company doesn't intend them to do and is adamantly against. Build a MythTV box instead and quit supporting closed source corporations.
There have always been rumors that TiVo has created the code in order to duplicated ReplayTV's show-sending features, but is holding all of them back until the lawsuits are settled.
If ReplayTV should ever win a lawsuit, TiVo would then be able to instantly roll out the feature without having to have won the legal fight themselves. If ReplayTV loses, they're the ones who have to pay the consequences.
Kinda a smart thing for them to do... staying away from the controversial issues until somebody else sorts them out.
I don't know why Tivo is concerned with video extraction on the Standalone (normal) Tivos since the signal is being endoded digitally from an analog signal inside the Tivo. So it isn't a perfect digital copy and is exactly what you can do with a PC with a TV tuner/Video In/MPEG encoder card.
However, the DirecTivos (DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes) store the digital signal straight off the satellite. Therefore you are getting a high quality pure digital signal encoded for you by DirecTV and therefore I can see why DirecTV is concerned about it with respect to the DMCA.
The steps to extract video is almost exactly the same for both Tivos and DirecTivos, so you can't talk about doing it for one without pretty much telling you how to do it for the other. Therefore it is a forboden topic on the most popular Tivo hacking site www.tivocommunity.com and often someone asks why it is forbidden to talk about extraction there quite often. Bottom line is that the owners of that forum (AVS Forum) don't want to get in trouble so they don't allow it.
Actually the caller-id pins from the modem aren't connected in the Series 1 standalone Tivos (the Tivo most people have). It would actually take some soldering to get it to work for those models. It does work most of the time in most of the Series 1 DirecTivo models.
Also, the "slot" that is avaliable on Series 1's isn't really a slot. It's this male PCI-looking ISA connector on the corner of the motherboard used for testing. The fact that Tivo hackers got ethernet cards to work with that thing that actually fit inside the Tivos was truly a major hack and I have a feeling the people at Tivo were pretty surprised when that was unveiled.
Tivo did, however, encourage the ethernet hacks. In the case of the Turbonet card, they even invited the hacker who created it (Jafa) to Tivo HQ to make sure that a proper driver for the Turbonet card made it into the next Tivo software release.
Your point about Tivo supporting certain hacks while discouraging others is still valid, then. Personally, though, I would rather a company allow some hacking and not allow other hacking rather than trying to sue everyone who opened their boxes and tried to fiddle with them.
Well I am the author of the mfsstream tivoweb module (used to extract shows in .ty format directly from a web browser which can then be converted to .mpg).
t hreadid=8092
see - http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?
I have been asked to be a contributor to this book so it looks like they aren't shying away from the topic at all..
-gosquad