Of course from a hacking standpoint, many of us have Tridge to thank for his work on the TivoNet card. That brought ethernet access to the TiVo, and his later work on video extraction made great use of the bandwidth.:)
Thanks, Tridge!
Of course, he's given credit in the book Hacking TiVo.:)
Hi, I'm the author of the book. I answer this question in this slashdot comment here. If someone wants to mod that up, that'd make things a lot easier.:)
I'm sorry to correct you, but you're wrong. I'm the author of the book. I've been told many times (in no uncertain terms) that it will only be available from amazon.com. Supposedly they came in a truck and picked up the copies from the publisher.
Now if bookpool were to buy copies from amazon.com and sell them at a loss, well then they're insane.:)
Are you sure it was this book? From what my publisher told me, someone from amazon.com came by with a truck and picked up all of their copies directly.
I'm curious as to whether any bookstores would buy copies from amazon.com and stock them on their shelves (or whether Borders has some special internal deal that otherwise isn't talked about).
But anyway, as the author of the book, I can tell you that I've been told repeatedly (in no uncertain terms) that this is only available at amazon.com. I'd love to see an exception.:)
As I state several times in the book, anyone not taking full advantage of the forums (doing many searches during their initial learning phase, and much contributing later on) is missing out.
Having been in the community for years using these hacks (and writing some of them), I couldn't agree more that the experience of being on the forum and sharing discoveries is huge.
However reinventing the wheel is only so much fun. Many people would rather have a compiled place for the common agreed-upon knowledge, then move onto the new stuff they'll create on their own sooner. How much time do people really want to spend trying to get tivoftpd0.1 to work before finding the buried away posts that explain that it was completely broken and that you should be using tivoftpd0.2? I think it's much more interesting writing your own hack and releasing it than worrying about the mundane issues like getting file transfers set up and installing existing hacks.
One other reason I was happy to write the book was to give people a place to send others when they hear the same (boring to them) question for the 500th time. Everyone wants to help out newcomers, but it's much more interesting talking about issues that haven't been fully reverse-engineered/understood yet than to rehash how to get your TiVo up and running on the net via PPP or a TurboNET card.
Don't be a burden on the community by asking common questions you didn't get answered by your initial searches.. Everyone would agree that you should read a FAQ before posting questions - this serves as a detailed, guided, and interesting (if I do say so myself) intro to get you caught up-to-speed on what we've all been doing.
I believe you're mistaken. The reasons I believe this has at [I]least[/I] a year's shelflife (if not a few more) are:
1) Series1 TiVos will remain the easiest to hack, and will be traded for years to come on eBay. TiVo Inc. almost certainly won't be updating the software on them, so they'll remain that way. Software necessary to upgrade your TiVo's hard drives comes on the accompanying CD-ROM, with detailed instructions. This alone for some people is justification for getting the book.
2) A lot of the hacks described in the book haven't changed much in years, and in some cases the authors felt their hacks (or sometimes ports) were "finished" and stopped work on them. This book pulls them together in one place. They won't be getting stale anytime soon (as time has shown).
3) The book serves as a launching-off point, describing what various hacks are and getting the reader enthusiastic about them. Though most of the hacks are included on the accompanying CD-ROM, in all cases the user is pointed to the current home of the project (with the accompanying web site picking up any after-printing changes), and encouraged to check out new versions. The reason you'd buy a book on this isn't hurt by time.
4) The development section of the book (talking about the internal architecture of the book, the internal APIs that access the MFS database, and development strategies to write your own hacks) won't get old, because none of that will change.
There have been many good pieces of info out there on the web - but they all cover one or two specific tasks, and they're all spread out all over the place. This book (combined with the CD-ROM that keeps many of these alive after the original sites went down) is a great intro (and reference guide) for both aspiring TiVo hackers and veterans alike.
Then again, I'm the author, so that might be a bit biased.:) Nah, it isn't.
Hi, I'm the author of the book. Here's the answer to a few of the questions asked here and elsewhere about my book.
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.
When I was 10, in fifth grade, my parents got me a Sinclair ZX-80. One kilobyte of memory (a whole 1024 bytes!!), a membrane keyboard, and a power cable so flimsy that hitting the membrane keyboard sometimes erased the computer's memory. Saving programs to tape was completely manual.
Years later, sheer luxury was lavished upon me with the COLOR Vic-20 for sale at Zayre's for some cheap price advertised in the newspaper. This, was an advanced machine. It had COLOR, after all, and a whole FIVE kilobytes of memory..
Better yet, the datacassette recorder was slightly automated! You still had to press play, but it would start the motor on its own and keep going until it saw your program.
Plus, this machine had a slot! (Well, ok, the ZX-80 had one as well for the 16K expansion module, but the power-cord problems made that practically unusable). This slot was used for such improvements as OmegaRace, the Scott Adams adventures (Adventureland, Pirate's Cove, etc), and the Expanded Graphics card.. That boosted memory slightly and added a true graphics mode, where you could (get this) access individual pixels on the screen.. High tech stuff..
Yep.:) As I posted on tivocommunity.com, when my editor sent me the first draft of the cover he had to warn me "The first thing you're going to notice is that it ISN'T A TIVO ON THE COVER", like he was talking down a wild gunman on a clock tower over a megaphone.:)
This looks like it has potential, but it still comes with a huge downside - the device isn't a TiVo.
There's a reason that TiVo is the most popular. The user interface is a pleasure to use. A lot of the fun of hacking your TiVo is that you're making that cool box better..
Plus, there's something unexplainably more-fun-than-it-should-be about modifying a device that wasn't designed for it..
If you want to play around with this but still want to be able to enjoy a great DVR, consider buying a TiVo to hack instead (or hacking the TiVo you already have).
Might I also humbly sugest picking up a copy of the book Hacking TiVo, which ships next week. (In all fairness, I am the author, so I might have a bit of a bias). You can also go to the web on your own to find everything, but this acts as a nice guide from your initial tinkering through to the development of your own hacks.
Hacking this device instead could definitely be interesting - it's just sad that you'd be stuck using it if it was your only DVR.
1) Buy him/her a Series1 TiVo (much easier to hack, or if you know their up-to-speed, then you can get him/her Series2 40 or 60 hour model if you can find one, rather than the 80).
You can let him/her go buy their own additional hard drive, though if you decide you've gotta buy that too get 120 gig or 160 gig IDE drive (doesn't have to be faster than 5400 rpm).
(By the way, the B in IMHBO stands for biased.:) )
I'd like to use it at video rental places and CD stores to get product reviews.
Bah! Here's an application for it.. You point it at the movie poster, it calls home, and has your TiVo schedule a Wishlist for the movie for when it finally comes out on HBO/Cinemax/Showtime/etc.
(Or using the video store example, you point it at a cassette and it does the same thing.. That way you schedule a whole bunch of movies you [I]also[/I] want to see, but you still rent the one you're in the store to get that night.)
Then again, what TiVo owner is in a video rental store?
p.s. This is all easy to do already, except the real-world hyperlink devices part.
Hey, I don't care at all what the spammers claim. I detest spammers. I personally hope nothing at all helps their cause in any way. However I'm extremely cautious about deciding to agree with laws that require that certain speech be labeled. Again, here my gut hopes it passes and that my "despair" will be coupled with "aww gee, now it's easy for me to create this filter....:) ", but when it comes down to what I believe, I'm pretty cautious.. It's a slippery slope. One minute we're saying "Yep, label spam", and then next we're saying "see? Labeling records and video games is more validated, more people were doing it..".. and the minute after that we're saying things like "hey, can't we make people label their religious content? That way I can filter out those comments too" (which again I'd love, but I'd get it at a big sacrifice there)..
Mandated labeling itself just feels wrong. My gut tells me "do it to spam though!", which is exactly why I'm troubled and tempted here..
I welcome further arguments to help me justify sending spammers to oblivion.. No one (except spammers) would say that that itself would be bad. I'm just nervous about the things we enable down the road by doing so.
I stand corrected on the source of the quote, and I'll even correct the quote itself:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserved neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Always thought that was Jefferson (even did a quick google before posting to verify it - it sucks when a majority of the people get it wrong).
I myself love the quote, which is one of the reasons I'm so tempted/torn/troubled with anti-spam legislation. In the end, I do in fact strongly believe in our freedoms (especially our freedom of speech), so I do ultimately side against the anti-spam laws in principle (despite how inconvenient spam makes my daily life, when I am barraged with it).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course from a hacking standpoint, many of us have Tridge to thank for his work on the TivoNet card. That brought ethernet access to the TiVo, and his later work on video extraction made great use of the bandwidth. :)
:)
Thanks, Tridge!
Of course, he's given credit in the book Hacking TiVo.
No, I don't cover extraction from Series2 TiVos. Trust me, I'd like to, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon in a published book.
:) )
:)
(At least not without a lot of fireworks and people getting burned..
Luckily, we have the internet for these few things that can't be talked about easily in print.
Hi, :)
I'm the author of the book. I answer this question in this slashdot comment here. If someone wants to mod that up, that'd make things a lot easier.
Thanks! :)
I'm sorry to correct you, but you're wrong. I'm the author of the book. I've been told many times (in no uncertain terms) that it will only be available from amazon.com. Supposedly they came in a truck and picked up the copies from the publisher.
:)
Now if bookpool were to buy copies from amazon.com and sell them at a loss, well then they're insane.
Are you sure it was this book? From what my publisher told me, someone from amazon.com came by with a truck and picked up all of their copies directly.
:)
I'm curious as to whether any bookstores would buy copies from amazon.com and stock them on their shelves (or whether Borders has some special internal deal that otherwise isn't talked about).
But anyway, as the author of the book, I can tell you that I've been told repeatedly (in no uncertain terms) that this is only available at amazon.com. I'd love to see an exception.
As I state several times in the book, anyone not taking full advantage of the forums (doing many searches during their initial learning phase, and much contributing later on) is missing out.
Having been in the community for years using these hacks (and writing some of them), I couldn't agree more that the experience of being on the forum and sharing discoveries is huge.
However reinventing the wheel is only so much fun. Many people would rather have a compiled place for the common agreed-upon knowledge, then move onto the new stuff they'll create on their own sooner. How much time do people really want to spend trying to get tivoftpd0.1 to work before finding the buried away posts that explain that it was completely broken and that you should be using tivoftpd0.2? I think it's much more interesting writing your own hack and releasing it than worrying about the mundane issues like getting file transfers set up and installing existing hacks.
One other reason I was happy to write the book was to give people a place to send others when they hear the same (boring to them) question for the 500th time. Everyone wants to help out newcomers, but it's much more interesting talking about issues that haven't been fully reverse-engineered/understood yet than to rehash how to get your TiVo up and running on the net via PPP or a TurboNET card.
Don't be a burden on the community by asking common questions you didn't get answered by your initial searches.. Everyone would agree that you should read a FAQ before posting questions - this serves as a detailed, guided, and interesting (if I do say so myself) intro to get you caught up-to-speed on what we've all been doing.
I believe you're mistaken. The reasons I believe this has at [I]least[/I] a year's shelflife (if not a few more) are:
:) Nah, it isn't.
1) Series1 TiVos will remain the easiest to hack, and will be traded for years to come on eBay. TiVo Inc. almost certainly won't be updating the software on them, so they'll remain that way. Software necessary to upgrade your TiVo's hard drives comes on the accompanying CD-ROM, with detailed instructions. This alone for some people is justification for getting the book.
2) A lot of the hacks described in the book haven't changed much in years, and in some cases the authors felt their hacks (or sometimes ports) were "finished" and stopped work on them. This book pulls them together in one place. They won't be getting stale anytime soon (as time has shown).
3) The book serves as a launching-off point, describing what various hacks are and getting the reader enthusiastic about them. Though most of the hacks are included on the accompanying CD-ROM, in all cases the user is pointed to the current home of the project (with the accompanying web site picking up any after-printing changes), and encouraged to check out new versions. The reason you'd buy a book on this isn't hurt by time.
4) The development section of the book (talking about the internal architecture of the book, the internal APIs that access the MFS database, and development strategies to write your own hacks) won't get old, because none of that will change.
There have been many good pieces of info out there on the web - but they all cover one or two specific tasks, and they're all spread out all over the place. This book (combined with the CD-ROM that keeps many of these alive after the original sites went down) is a great intro (and reference guide) for both aspiring TiVo hackers and veterans alike.
Then again, I'm the author, so that might be a bit biased.
Hi,
:)
I'm the author of the book. I answer this question in this slashdot comment here. If someone wants to mod that up, that'd make things a lot easier.
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.
When I was 10, in fifth grade, my parents got me a Sinclair ZX-80. One kilobyte of memory (a whole 1024 bytes!!), a membrane keyboard, and a power cable so flimsy that hitting the membrane keyboard sometimes erased the computer's memory. Saving programs to tape was completely manual.
Years later, sheer luxury was lavished upon me with the COLOR Vic-20 for sale at Zayre's for some cheap price advertised in the newspaper. This, was an advanced machine. It had COLOR, after all, and a whole FIVE kilobytes of memory..
Better yet, the datacassette recorder was slightly automated! You still had to press play, but it would start the motor on its own and keep going until it saw your program.
Plus, this machine had a slot! (Well, ok, the ZX-80 had one as well for the 16K expansion module, but the power-cord problems made that practically unusable). This slot was used for such improvements as OmegaRace, the Scott Adams adventures (Adventureland, Pirate's Cove, etc), and the Expanded Graphics card.. That boosted memory slightly and added a true graphics mode, where you could (get this) access individual pixels on the screen.. High tech stuff..
Commodore 64 users were spoiled.
Uh, yeah!! Go ask him now! Ain't dads great?
:)
(Luckily I got to thank my Dad for his contribution in Chapter 16 of my Hacking TiVo book!)
Yep. :) As I posted on tivocommunity.com, when my editor sent me the first draft of the cover he had to warn me "The first thing you're going to notice is that it ISN'T A TIVO ON THE COVER", like he was talking down a wild gunman on a clock tower over a megaphone. :)
(Correction, I mistook which device this was, so disregard the part about the lack of challenge of hacking it.)
This looks like it has potential, but it still comes with a huge downside - the device isn't a TiVo.
There's a reason that TiVo is the most popular. The user interface is a pleasure to use. A lot of the fun of hacking your TiVo is that you're making that cool box better..
Plus, there's something unexplainably more-fun-than-it-should-be about modifying a device that wasn't designed for it..
If you want to play around with this but still want to be able to enjoy a great DVR, consider buying a TiVo to hack instead (or hacking the TiVo you already have).
Might I also humbly sugest picking up a copy of the book Hacking TiVo , which ships next week. (In all fairness, I am the author, so I might have a bit of a bias). You can also go to the web on your own to find everything, but this acts as a nice guide from your initial tinkering through to the development of your own hacks.
Hacking this device instead could definitely be interesting - it's just sad that you'd be stuck using it if it was your only DVR.
Hands down, IMHBO, the coolest geek setup ever:
:) )
1) Buy him/her a Series1 TiVo (much easier to hack, or if you know their up-to-speed, then you can get him/her Series2 40 or 60 hour model if you can find one, rather than the 80).
2) Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement and Development Starter Kit with CD-ROM, by Jeff Keegan.
3) A #10 Torx screwdriver.
You can let him/her go buy their own additional hard drive, though if you decide you've gotta buy that too get 120 gig or 160 gig IDE drive (doesn't have to be faster than 5400 rpm).
(By the way, the B in IMHBO stands for biased.
This is just as shameless as if I said something like, oh I dunno, Buy my Hacking TiVo book!.
Those bastards!
ICON IC-R3 $449.95
Extra Battery & car adaptor $119.95
Series1 Standalone TiVo(eBay) $182.50
Car->110volt-adapter $ 35.99
Hacking TiVo Book $ 20.99
AirNET adapter $ 69.25
Watching extracted TiVo video synced from your
house to your car: Pricele..... **CRASH**
New Fender $210.00
Insurance Deductable $300.00
Emergency Room Co-pay $ 50.00
Who the hell modded this up?
Someone should videotape this event, put the video onto their TiVo, then extract that video (into tmf format) and post it. Kinda symbolic.
(Details on how to do this are available on the web, plus elsewhere)
but then again that's because I'm writing it. :)
Bah! Here's an application for it.. You point it at the movie poster, it calls home, and has your TiVo schedule a Wishlist for the movie for when it finally comes out on HBO/Cinemax/Showtime/etc.
(Or using the video store example, you point it at a cassette and it does the same thing.. That way you schedule a whole bunch of movies you [I]also[/I] want to see, but you still rent the one you're in the store to get that night.)
Then again, what TiVo owner is in a video rental store?
p.s. This is all easy to do already, except the real-world hyperlink devices part.
Hey, I don't care at all what the spammers claim. I detest spammers. I personally hope nothing at all helps their cause in any way. However I'm extremely cautious about deciding to agree with laws that require that certain speech be labeled. Again, here my gut hopes it passes and that my "despair" will be coupled with "aww gee, now it's easy for me to create this filter.... :) ", but when it comes down to what I believe, I'm pretty cautious.. It's a slippery slope. One minute we're saying "Yep, label spam", and then next we're saying "see? Labeling records and video games is more validated, more people were doing it..".. and the minute after that we're saying things like "hey, can't we make people label their religious content? That way I can filter out those comments too" (which again I'd love, but I'd get it at a big sacrifice there)..
Mandated labeling itself just feels wrong. My gut tells me "do it to spam though!", which is exactly why I'm troubled and tempted here..
I welcome further arguments to help me justify sending spammers to oblivion.. No one (except spammers) would say that that itself would be bad. I'm just nervous about the things we enable down the road by doing so.
I stand corrected on the source of the quote, and I'll even correct the quote itself:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserved neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
Always thought that was Jefferson (even did a quick google before posting to verify it - it sucks when a majority of the people get it wrong).
I myself love the quote, which is one of the reasons I'm so tempted/torn/troubled with anti-spam legislation. In the end, I do in fact strongly believe in our freedoms (especially our freedom of speech), so I do ultimately side against the anti-spam laws in principle (despite how inconvenient spam makes my daily life, when I am barraged with it).
But that isn't quite as funny, now, is it?
Yeah, Jefferson wasn't barraged daily with details on how to grow his penis.