![](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126615075/828470099.jpg)
It's not quite as cool as Replay's feature, but hey TiVo is still selling hardware. This may require a little more elbow grease than the first two hacks, but if. All the usual Tivo type features, limited only by the number of tuners I have in. Is there anyway to upgrade a Tivo Series 2 with one tuner to 2 tuners? All retail software uses a serial number or key of some form. The installation often requires the user to enter a valid serial number to proceed. A serial can also be referred to as a 'CD Key'. When you search for Tivo Desktop Plus Activation Key Serial for example, you may find the word 'serial' amongst the results.
Ok, well, maybe I didn't read the slashdot article too closely. The purpose of this is in order to download the schedule data.
Oops.Either way, this still is NOT beneficial for TiVo. The reason being, the whole way they make money, is that they get you to buy this TiVo box. However, the money is made in the long term. You pay $9.95/month for TV schedule listings for as long as you can afford, in order to get the benefits of TiVo.
They of course, make a lot of money this way, and the short term of it. The $300-$500 investment isn't their only source of revenue.Well, anyway, my point is, that TiVo may not like this either, since, you're stealing a huge source of revenue from them. One useful thing Tivo could do with ethernet ports would be clustering. (No, this isn't the obligitory 'imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things' comment)Take 2 Tivos and a crossover cable, now you can record 2 shows at once, watch shows recorded on one Tivo in on the TV connected to the other Tivo, use 1 phone call to update both units, etc.You could probably do this with 10BaseT bandwith, it would be trivial with 100BaseT.If Tivo included this in their units it would be a HUGE selling point. Then you keep the signal digital, don't need to worry about compression (or generation loss). And you can edit on the Mac/PC using Adobe Premiere/Final Cut/etc.
Remove commercials, add your own commentary. Your imagination is the limit. A lot of MiniDV camcorders can take RCA/S-Video input. Just route your cable signal into your camcorder. Or be super cool and get one of those Sony DV decks.
They're nice.:)Of course, then there's the problem that you only get 4 minutes per gig. But one could easily make a 320 gig (or greater) RAID array using the latest ATA/100 drives. Wow - talk about timely. Just yesterday Virgin Connect cancelled their free connectivity program and are now asking users to ship their Webplayers back.I got one of those for my mother-in-law, who wanted to send email to my wife, but didn't want to learn to use a 'real' computer (I was going to teach her to use FreeBSD/Emacs/Gnus to read email:). Virgin asserts that the little appliances cannot be reprogrammed to use another ISP, and while I'm skeptical about that, I'd really rather hook the unit into my LAN.So someone, anyone, please figure out how to hack a NIC into Virgin Connect's defunct Webplayers so that I can have a neat little web appliance in my kitchen.
TiVo dials up a local UUNet POP, gets an IP address and then downloads guide data via HTTP. The ability to retrieve the data is based on having an active account which is keyed to the serial number of your TiVo.
There has been some discussion about how to get the guide data for free, but since TiVo is not complaining about us hacking around with it (instead of screaming like i-Opener did), no one really wants to piss them off by trying to get the service for free. Not least of which, it's unethical to do so.forgive me, for I am not a TiVo owner, but is that all it would take to get your TiVo information from your broadband connection? Seems unlilkely to me that the TiVo is making a PPP or SLIP connection to the net and downloading it's info via some TCP/IP protocol. Am i wrong about this?I'm pretty sure it is just a TCP connection over PPP or SLIP. It's actually a very good solution to the problem of getting program listing, software updates, and other things to TiVo subscribers. Rather than having to set up an extensive network of dial-in numbers all over the country or spending way too much on 800 numbers, it makes a lot more sense for TiVo to partner with an existing ISP to leverage their existing network of telephone numbers.
This also means that TiVo doesn't have to waste time developing and maintaining proprietary protocols - they can just use the standard protocols that come with Linux. It also means that moving to other communication channels which use the same higher level protocol (TCP) will be a snap for them if they decide to sell boxes with ethernet cards, for example. I'm sure this benefitted them when they released the DirectTV/TiVo combination units recently. As many of you know, the TiVo runs linux. The guide data and software updates are usually downloaded in a nightly call to either a 1-800 number or a local UUnet access number.What has been done is set up the 'DSS' port (also a serial port) to be a linux console. Another hack has made it redirect the 'nightly call' through the serial port as PPP instead of the modem. This way you can hook it up to a box with a PPP server and a cable modem, but you only get 115,200 bps.This will allow the TiVo to connect to a network and get TiVo guide data without the serial port hack.Currently, this will NOT let people download TiVo video data to the computer.
It is stored in a proprietary format that has not been hacked yet.Whatever support the Ethernet has in tivo, it is from hacking the backend linux part. The front end, the graphical shell that you see on the TV (its called myworld) has NO SUPPORT for this.As for why TiVo never put Ethernet support in the thing, it was a corporate decision. TiVo has deals with a few major networks, including NBC. These nets hate having their stuff put on the internet minus ads.
Ethernet would make this easier. Since the phone connection is toll free or local, they decided to go with a phone-only system.
I dont blame them. I'm not skilled enough to figure out the filesys format myself, but what progress has been made by others to figure it out?I'm waiting for the day when I can hack my DirecTiVo to offer SMB or NFS shares of recorded MPG files. If SciFi channel repeats the series again, I want to save the entire run of Babylon5 on VCD.:) If the filesys hasn't been hacked by 2nd run on SciFi, I plan to hack my DirecTivo for more disk space, so I can keep all 110 episodes on it.Wonder how much a Tivo with all 110 Bab5 episodes could fetch on eBay?:). This is great news - one of the things that I require before I will buy a TiVo is Ethernet support. The other thing is a program guide for C-Band (large dish) satellite service, esp.
![Hack tivo series 3 without service Hack tivo series 3 without service](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126615075/724653433.png)
The backhaul feeds.Several people have talked about reverse engineering the TiVo program guide service. While I agree that TiVo should be able to make money selling a service, I also think that a little competition would be a good thing: I don't think TiVo wants to support C-Band. Perhaps somebody else will. I'd happily pay for a guide service for C-Band (I already pay for a paper guide for C-Band), preferably one I can grep for what I want to record (SELECT all from MOVIETYPE='Spaghetti Western' AND COMMERCIALS='false') (OK, that was psuedo-SQL not grep regex).Being able to archive programs (as provided by Fair Use) would be nice too.
![](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126615075/828470099.jpg)