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Blowing TiVo's Lid
An anonymous reader writes "Taking things apart is just plain fun, but there's also a lot to learn about how to build a foolproof Linux-based appliance. Break out your Torx drivers and take a closer look at TiVo's inner Linux workings. Examining the TiVo system reveals how one company made the transition from desktop operating system to embedded system."
didn't i read this 2.5 weeks ago?!?
first posted on slashdot 7/6/05 - dang!
it didn't talk about extracting or decrypting video, so no. It just voids your warranty.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
- I owns TiVo box, I want to open it, I make a photo
- Oh, a hard-disk. Let's pull it off and mount it on a regular PC
- See here how I can use bzip2 to make a backup of the drive, BUT BUT! also to restore the backup onto the drive! Shit I'm geeky...
- Ok so now I tinker a bit and I find a bunch of partitions
- I mount the partitions and notice a bunch of init scripts
- I also notice a bunch of custom programs, written in whatever language does the job, but I decide it looks like a big mess
- I insert a phrase saying that I'm not interesting in modifying the thing, just study it. You never know with these lawyers...
- I conclude with vague statements about Linux philosophies
(- Additionally, I post a black-and-white photo of me showing my long hair. That's how geeky I am!)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's amazing how frequently I have these experiences of deja vu while reading Slashdot.
Me: Hey Son, bring my toolbox.
Son: What is it this time?
Me: Dont worry. The Tivo box is gonna be alright.
Son: Mamaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Dad is gonna blew something again. This time it is Tivo
Me:I will just open and see.
Wife: (looks at me)
Me: Ok, forget it.
Basically, what I'm getting at is this: I automatically lose interest in an article when its opening statement is ignorant about the topic. The author's opening line made the rest of his entire arguement null-and-void, as far as I'm concerned. Claiming that linux has more successful roots in the desktop GUI market than it does in the embedded market is one of the more ignorant things he could have said.
/dev/random
Er...
Linux was created by Torvards for use on his home pc...
I would call that pretty strong roots in desktop...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
http://www.tivo.com/linux/linux.asp
This article: http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=sh owpage&pid=53 includes a lot more info about the history of tivo, specifically in regard to how it relies on open source software
every stain tells a story
This story was first posted back on July 6 when the article was first released.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
This article is a birds eye view of TiVo. It barely scratches the surface of the inner workings of the unit. He touches on things that people have known about for years.
What I would love to see is someone totally hack a TiVo, and come up with their own distro that is capable of running MythTV.
Yes, it may seem a little redundant, but with the future of TiVo up in the air, a lot of customers may have nothing but useless doorstops one day and having an alternate TiVo distro would be a great way to save them and keep them running. After all, why dedicate a PC to the task when you can have an embedded unit doing what it was designed to do.
It's official - even CmdrTaco doesn't read Slashdot!
#DeleteChrome
The license for glibc says:
TiVo's obligation is to provide source so that you can put together the base system that the TiVo software runs on (meaning that taking it apart is not particularly necessary), but they only have to include changes they made to the base system, not complete programs they wrote (and they probably chose supported hardware, formats, and so forth, so that they wouldn't have to write special drivers).
I have to agree with you. Just because the guy made one comment about a company going from "desktop operating system to embedded system" doesn't null and void the entire article!
I mean really, it's no trivial matter to create a custom piece of hardware from scratch, make it run Linux, and make people have no idea that they're not just using another random hardware device.
Claiming that linux has more successful roots in the desktop GUI market than it does in the embedded market is one of the more ignorant things he could have said.
I would say putting words in the authors mouth and misrepresenting him would be one of the more ignorant things a person could do.
The article author never said "desktop GUI market" he just said "desktop market." So relax! If you think it's so easy to build a Linux distro from scratch for an embedded device, then let's see you do it!
God, this is old news...
I upgraded my TiVo about
Even my journal on here covers more than his did.
http://slashdot.org/~JWSmythe/journal/98940
http://slashdot.org/~JWSmythe/journal/99310
http://slashdot.org/~JWSmythe/journal/99319
I've done lots more than this. I have 3 TiVo's upgraded, hacked, and working now. Two are at my house, one at my girlfriends. It's nice when people give you "broken" boxes, just to find out they weren't all that broken. One did have a completely failed modem, but that was easy enough to deal with. (Hmm, how do you do a fresh install with no modem? Magic. hehe)
If he would have read up a little on the subject before making himself look like a complete freakin' moron, there are two pairs of boot/root partitions. 3/4 and 6/7 . They do this for upgrades. If you're using the 3/4 pair, the upgrade gets installed into the 6/7 pair. things that must survive through upgrades are kept in
It's very likely to have a boot/root pair empty, or just to confuse our winner a little more, both of them populated, but having different versions of the OS in them.
And... He did his examinations of the partitions the hardest way possible. There are plenty of boot CD's, which give support for the TiVo partition table (ya, ya, apple), and a few other customizations, to make things easy.
Oh, and his comment saying S2 is worse that S1 for hacking is just stupid.
God, I hope he didn't actually get paid to write that crap.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
you can see the inside of a HD TiVo.
Best Buy can have you arrested
What's considered a low number?
;)
Not 120168.
What I don't understand is why he even bothered with this type of activity. Given a mountain of knowledge about Tivos, including partitions and OS dissection on the net, why not build on that? Simple search is not good enough? What's going to be next, "our expert have dissected a frog and found out this squishy part to be its stomach! Hooray!" published in medical magazines?
Hyperom.com