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Book Review: Hacking TiVo
As a relatively early convert to the TiVo way of life, I always found it hard to describe to people who didn't have one why their lives could be changed by it. If I was lucky, I could get friends to visit and with a few short minutes of demonstration, I'd sold another one. If they were farther away, I just hoped they would stop by some day and I'd have another convert. Why was I so intent on this? Because if you watch TV, or even if you don't watch as much as you used to, TiVo can change your life completely. It frees you from the tyranny of watching shows when you're told to watch them, and then goes on to turn your entire television experience from one bombarded with ads and missing all the "good stuff" on scattered random channels, to a true symbiotic relationship where you sit down in front of the tube and every single moment is one filled with shows you want to watch about stuff you're interested in.
A lot of Slashdot readers know what I'm talking about, because they have a TiVo or other PVR in their home right now. So when I tell you that this book will take your TiVo to the next level, I hope you get as excited as I was after reading the dozens of tricks, programs, and hacks this book lists.
The opening chapter describes, in succinct but energetic fashion, why every person with a TV should have a TiVo. Keegan's description may fall towards the evangelical side of things, but he goes out of his way to explain why his feelings are so strong. In fact, this book has an interesting side-effect: converting those who don't own a TiVo. Just a quick browse through the first few chapters will have someone who's heard of TiVo but never used one chomping at the bit to get down to the store. To the TiVo army, this is a powerful munition indeed.
From there, it's a powerful spiral into chapter after chapter of modifications, starting with back doors in the code and moving into opening the TiVo's case (explained with lots of clear pictures), adding storage, and even working with the TiVo's OS (a variation of Linux) to turn it into a web-accessible site or to improve performance.
One inspiring chapter describes the author's experience at a baseball game, having his father go to get refreshments and missing some great plays, and the author pulling out his Palm Pilot with cellular modem to tell his TiVo over the web to record the game's highlights on the news. With that tantalizing trick presented, Keegan goes into the whole involved deal, everything from modifying the TiVo to creating the external server to feed the TiVo information.
As I said, the tricks come fast and furious: TiVo as a way to browse photo galleries. TiVo pulling down the current weather and presenting the radar maps. TiVo printing Caller ID information on the screen when someone calls. By the time you're done with the book, you'll be wondering what there is that you can't do with it. And that, to me, is the sign of a truly great instructional book.
A warning: If you want a neutral voice in the author, this isn't the book for you. Keegan's enthusiasm drips from many pages, written in the tone of the guy down the street with the new toy who simply has take you to the den and show you how cool it is, describing in greater and greater detail all the cool stuff he's discovered tinkering with it. The author's wife, newborn daughter, mother and father make appearances all throughout the book, including a particularly touching description of having his father design an assembly language program to manipulate an LED display. No, really, it's touching. I did a search for Jeff and information on him and I found a photo of him in this costume. Honestly, I'm speechless. The man has achieved what we call "full commitment."
By about halfway through the book it stops being an instruction manual and begins being a full-on reference book, giving you explicit instructions on programming in Tcl, mucking about in Linux, and generally being a hard-core warranty violator. One appendix is dedicated to being a Tcl reference list while another hits you up for some basic Linux training (to be able to work comfortably in the OS).
Keegan has also been kind enough to include a CD-ROM with pretty much all the programs and utilities needed to accomplish what's in his book. It's a telling personal trait that he apologizes for putting it all on a CD instead of enabling readers to go out and search for the programs themselves.
To say I learned things in this book is an amazing understatement. Just to know that some of these things are even possible with my TiVo guarantee how I'll be spending the next few hundred dollars, buying larger drives, getting a cache card, and wiring the machine for ethernet. And Yes, it tells you how to get the shows off of your TiVo onto your computer's hard drive.
When I ordered this book from Amazon, I found out it was an Amazon exclusive, so that's the only place to get it right now. On the other hand, I was able to get my copy in a very short time, so I'm fine with that ... but I hope that you can get it in other places in the future. Regardless, it was worth the money I paid for it, especially since Amazon had 30 percent off in some effort to push to product. Great for me; I'm glad this book came into my collection and I think any TiVo owner (or hopeful TiVo owner) will agree.
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Does it go into hacking the Series 2 TiVo? I'm sick of reading about all these obsolete series 1 hack methods.
I'd just like to get bash working on my Series 2 stand-alone with minimal effort.
As a hacker of many TiVos, I must say that when I saw this book the first thing I thought was how fast the info would be out of date. Every time TiVo pushes a new version of the software, you have to get new hacking info from the web sites. Does this book even code the new DVD-R TiVos? I bet there was old info in this book the first day it hit the shelves. This is not good subject matter for a paper book.
-Mike
I'm still not sure why more people haven't adopted ATI's All in Wonder cards. I use mine for everything that the TiVo can do, plus a lot of the stuff that you can hack the TiVo to do. I can login remotely and set it to record. I can burn VCD/SVCD/DVDs without hacking anything. And adding storage? I've got its cache and recording space set up on my NAS. And all for less than $150
Tivo Community Forum
Deal Database Forums
Tivo Web Project Home Page
I found it to be really enjoyable to sift through many different forums for instructions on how to mod my TiVo. I learned more by reading more than one persons account on how to do things, and was able to get help by posting questions.There's a ton of info out there if you're willing to search, otherwise, I guess the 21 bucks is a decent price to pay, and you won't have to get flamed for asking a dumb question.
Napoleon watches from the hereafter: "If I only had FOX News, nobody would have known of my defeat in Russia"
From discussing something like this with a friend who used to work with one of the local university TV stations, the way these systems work is by looking for the "network black" screen as the program fades out to commercial, and comes back. You'd have to program some method of identifying this solely black screen and triggering the pause/record method around it.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I wonder if ROW (rest of world) realizes that its irrelevant for them to hold opinions. America can buy, sell, destroy, or reconstruct any nation, any group of nations, or any other policital or geographical entity many times over. For all practical purposes, you don't exist. You are ants to our godhood
Empires rise, empires fall. History's full of examples.
America won't always be the world's only superpower. And when that change happens it won't be as obvious as you'd imagine.
Until that time, I'm sure you and others like you will happily live in ignorance thinking that other nations are just pawns on your chessboard. Just try to remember that, in the endgame, pawns are often the deadliest pieces.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I think the price decrease is across the board, as well--you might find Hughes units at 99 at Circuit City.
I'm not sure about your setup--I live in a condo, and hence the dishes I use are multi-dwelling units, and so my signal comes in via a single stacked and diplexed coax line. I need to destack it, re-diplex it, and then feed both the odd and even transponder signals to the DTivo.
When you say your basement only has one input, does that mean just one coax drop? If so, you'll either want to run another length of cable down, or stack the odd and even transponder signals on the one line (and destack after it comes out. Since stackers run in the hundred+ dollar range, I think the extra cabling would be a more cost effective option.
If, however, you're already using a Sony B-55 DirecTV receiver (what I believe is known as a wideband receiver) down there, you might already have a stacked signal going down to the basement, and all you'd need is a destacker and a signal splitter.
Otherwise, you might look into putting the Basement TiVo with your living room setup and using something like a remote and video sender combination or something that to get reception in the basement...
This thread at the Tivo community forum was most helpful in figuring out my problem with the stackers and destackers.
Hope this helps...
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
"Granted I've never seen the point of what is basically a glorified VCR/TV Guide hybrid for $9.95/month."
Ah I see you are speaking from years of ignorance.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I no longer use my old Series 1 tivo. The hacks are nice, but with something based on a PC, the sky's the limit.
Currently, I'm using SageTV It's a PC based DVR software package. With it, I can currently;
- Record two standard def stations, and a high def station at the same time while watching a fourth video of any type. (Obviously, this requires having two tuners and an HDTV tuner.)
- Record standard TV to MPEG-2, MPEG-1, or just about any other format. This makes it easier to make VCDs, DVDs, or just play the program back on a standard PC.
- Playback using Dscalar to deinterlace the video.
- Play DVDs
- Play DivX
- Record shows as favorites (just like season passes) or let SageTV record things based on my past viewing habits (much like tivo's suggestions only I don't have to bother with thumbs up and down buttons)
- Do all of the above with an integrated schedule, which is free. No need to pay a monthly fee.
- Play and manage my MP3 library (I think you can do ogg, ape, etc. with some tweaks to the config)
- Stream video and audio to another PC over my LAN.
I'm sure I'm missing much more. This thing does way more than any tivo, even a hacked tivo, and it's constantly being expanded. It surpasses TiVo and ReplyTV in every way. I've even found it to be more flexible than MythTV and Showstopper (though they do have a few benefits in some areas.)
Every description of why someone should buy a TiVo sounds like it's aimed at people who have never seen a VCR.
Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is kind of like comparing a computer's word processor to a typewriter. Sure, you use both of them to type letters and documents and whatnot, but the only people who would ever say that the two are the same are those who have never used a word processor, or for some maniacal reason like to use white-out on their mistakes.
Took a week's vacation recently. When I got back home, there was 22 hours of new programming for me to choose from.
Here's what I do to rip tv shows off my tivo:
Telnet to the tivo, start TyServer.
Launch the TyServer client on my windows machine.
Select the shows I want. click "grab"
They are pulled down as seperate streams, one for audio, one for video. You can directly import these files into several DVD creation programs, that automatically recode them to the DVD spec, or you can edit the files with a program such as TMPEnc to remove commercials and such. Re-ecoding such files gets a bit tricky, I'm still trying to find the best parameters to fit about 4 hours of acceptable quality video onto a 4GB DVD-R
I got tivo four years ago and instantly fell deeply in love with it. That love continues to this day, but has changed form. About a year ago, I realized that my giddy passion had given way to serenity, by which I mean that I realized that I just didn't want to watch tv any more, even on tivo. It was tivo that got me to this state of mind. It started by seeing how intrusive commercials were, and how much better tv was without it. The next phase for me was the realization of how manipulative the networks were with their program timing and scheduling; how wonderful to be free of that too! And then last summer I found I had dined at the table of paradise enough. I had actually watched enough episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and tons of other shows. To borrow an analogy from another slashdot writer, it was like the weekly trip to the hardware store after you've bought a new house, where one day you get there and you realize that you just don't need anything else, and you turn around and leave.
This has been a profound experience for me. And I don't think I could have gotten here without Tivo. Maybe I would have and it would have taken longer, but I like to think it was tivo.
Now I keep tivo around for the kid (Sesame St, etc).
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Okay, because you asked for it, here are the major differences between Series 1 and Series 2 standalone devices:
Series 1
Series 2
There are people who've successfully hacked the Series 2 TiVos by replacing the BIOS with one that has the signature-check edited out, but that requires soldering, which is more than most TiVophiles are comfortable with.
In contrast, people with Series 1 devices have added ethernet cards, installed more RAM, installed Apache and a full web-based UI for programming TiVo, etc.
I own a couple of Series 1 standalone TiVos, but don't own any Series 2 standalones. I do own an HDVR2, which is the second generation DirecTV-integrated model. I haven't done anything to it yet.
Is your reference for a Tivo Series 1?
I'm curious...is this book only on series 1 or does it go into detail on the series 2 boxes? I know you can get into the 2's now...but, still a bit of a hassle if I remember what I last learned....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Q: I'm confused.. Where can I buy it again? :)
A: Only at amazon.com. Anyone who's ever written or knows a writer knows how little writing pays, so if you'd like to give more at no cost to yourself, use that link.
Q: Can't I get all of this for free elsewhere?
A: Absolutely, the hacks talked about are all out there. What this book does is bring them together in one place, walk you through them with a consistent voice, and start you off on what's needed to write your own hacks (for example, with a description of the internal APIs TiVo has to access their proprietary MFS filesystem, etc). I've had many friends who are competent developers who wanted to try implementing a few ideas in their TiVo, but didn't want to play the catch-up game of reading through thousands of posts to try to gleam what collective knowledge we've all accumulated. Re-inventing the wheel might be fun, but it's not as fun as creating something of your own using the creations that have preceded you.
Also, many of the sites that used to host various TiVo hacks have disappeared because the authors have moved on to other things. I wanted to make sure these hacks were collected in one permanent place (on the CD-ROM for the book).
Q: Does your book cover Series2?
A: Yes and no. Series2 users can use the book and accompanying CD-ROM to add larger hard drives to their TiVo, and to mount Series2 drives. As for describing how to get a bash prompt, that I don't describe, for various legal reasons (the exemptions granted under the DMCA aren't as nice as my publisher would like them to be). Once you've gone off to find out how to do that (via the BASH_ENV and 2-kernel-monte exploits described at places like dealdatabase.com), much of the book still applies.. (even though I don't ship series2 binaries for everything, my descriptions of the tools and the development talk still applies and makes for interesting reading).
Q: Does your book cover Series1 DirecTiVos?
A: Yes, although again for legal reasons there's one step where I tell you in the book that you need to look elsewhere first (obtaining a bash prompt by flashing your prom). If you purchase a TurboNET card (as I'd imagine you will if you have a Series1 DirecTiVo) then the software on the TurboNET site will flash the prom for you so you can move on. Once that step is done, the rest of the book applies to your DirecTiVo completely (with the exception of video extraction).
Q: Hey, yeah, video extraction.. Do you cover video extraction?
A: Yes, I cover video extraction (and insertion), for Series1 standalones only. Series1 DirecTiVos scramble video by default, and though there is a simple hack out there to disable this scrambling, I'm prohibited legally from talking about it in the book. I don't cover Series2 extraction either.
Those are the main five I get asked most. I spent many months on this, and I'm glad that people finally have a chance to read it. I hope everyone enjoys the book! More than that, I hope this attracts new developers to this great platform.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
I could use something cheaper but I use TiVo. I can build a PVR but I use TiVo. Heck, I could do a much better job than the lame homebrew alternatives I've seen posted here (vidcap cards that can't sync audio). I do it not simply becuase I think they did it better. Few corporations out there "get it". TiVo does. They have not only been hacker friendly, turning a blind eye to nearly all of it, but put in the minimal amount to keep the MPAA happy in newer models. They are also respectful of privacy in an industry that doesn't. Recently a TiVo exec in a TV interview explained the level of privacy intrusion commercial PVRs are capable of. Not only could they report to interested parties that you watched Bend It Like Beckham at 2:00AM last night but you freezed framed on Kiera Knightley's upskirt cartwheel for 20 minutes. Most companies in a position to collect and distribute information like this are all to happy to profit and obfuscate their actions under a general license agreement. TiVo doesn't. They tell you exactly what they collect and where it goes. There also keen on keeping it this way. Instead of just screaming violently at the groups that want to violate our electronic freedoms shouldn't we support the ones that think like us? We need to support the few companies like this with our cash so maybe more will "get it". If respecting privacy isn't profitable what corp. is going to care? We already now what side the government is on.