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Linux Software

More Tivo Hacking 92

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tons-of-juicy-nuggets-to-read dept.
Logik writes: "It appears a bunch of guys over at http://www.geocities.com/tivohack/ have hacked the tivo to add a second hard drive. It appears they run Linux on a 50mhz PowerPC chip. They've even open sourced the kernel." Tons of great ways to void your warranty, and information about the guts. Also talks about how to add disk space. (Huzzah!) I'm also hearing rumors of MP3 playing on the boxes as well.
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More Tivo Hacking More

More Tivo Hacking

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  • The article said that "They've even open sourced the kernel." I would actually be quite surprised if they didn't- after all, the Linux kernel is released under the GPL, which requires all derived works to also be open source. I don't see why Logik stated this fact as if it's nice of them to do that - it's not like they had any other option.

  • ...Would be a modified Linux kernel for the TiVo to mount its media partition via NFS.
    Build a 4x60gb raid array on a 100mbit network and you're set...
    Or, NFS-mount your friend's server across DSL or something (wonder if the throughput would allow that...). I can see it now, TiVo rings. Probably would be able to watch anything, anytime if it was implemented napster-style...

    The gotcha is the TiVo doesn't have ethernet...
  • The article said that "They've even open sourced the kernel." I would actually be quite surprised if they didn't- after all, the Linux kernel is released under the GPL, which requires all derived works to also be open source. I don't see why Logik stated this fact as if it's nice of them to do that - it's not like they had any other option.
    I'd be suprised if they didn't, but if they didn't state that they did so prominently I'd be totally unsuprised if the drooling hoardes didn't assume they didn't release under the GPL and go on a witch hunt w/o checking facts first. As far as reporting on it ZDnet the idea of the GPL is still new to the media, even though its been around for ages. (I'm assuming ZDnet went out of their way to state this, don't watch the show and can't find it on the GeoCities page...)

  • Will TV card software make Tivo obsolete? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Will cards with cable TV input capability (such as the Matrox G400TV and ATI all-in-wonder) and the right software make Tivo obsolete? The idea is that you would only need the software to tell the card when and what to record, leave your box on, and it simply records it to an mpeg file on the drive?

    Does this software exist now? Or are they holding it back?
  • I'd love to if I had the cash and watched that much TV...

    Having a TiVo has definitely cured me of not watching much TV. I rarely watched TV before I got one, and now I watch something practically every day because it's just so convenient. I try to exercise while I watch, though, so that it doesn't feel like a total waste of time (getting me into the habit of exercising was certainly not one of the side effects I expected).

    TiVo unfortunately won't help with cash problems, though. It would have made them worse if you picked up some TiVo stock awhile back like I did. Apart from that, expect to see the price of TiVo units fall a lot this year as hard drives become cheaper and as Sony comes out with their 60(?) hour version which should push down the other price points.

  • They also released some utils that they made. I don't think they were required to do that since I don't think they were based on anything else.
  • This is the 3rd article on this, if you want to post about it, post about the latest things we've done on it. (and i say "we", because i'm one of the people working on various things)..

    To quickly cover some things, we have support (for those that dare to do it, support for large disks (over 30 gigs, i'm currently at 108 hours @ a 61 gig for a 2nd drive), ppp/ftp/telnet are now useable, MP3's are NOT playable on the TiVo, and it's not an issue atm, the mpeg decoder does NOT support layer 3. There are other things being worked on that will reveal themselves as time progresses.. I think this whole zdtv thing is probably why this "article" got posted again. if you _really_ want to know what's going on, check out the avs tivo forum (specifically, the underground for "hacking" issues), and a final note, *NO ONE IN OUR GROUP IS TOUCHING SUBSCRIPTION ITEMS*, so personally, if you do, and tivo catches you (and i hope they do).. you were warned.. Now, back to the recycling of old stories. As for the moderators, mark me redundant all you want, I don't really care about "karma" et al, i'm too busy working on TiVo things.

  • Och, mein VCR has crashed! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    TiVo brings a novel experience to your living room. Mine, a commercial 2-drive unit, tends to crash and need a reboot if it's not touched for a few days or if the drives get too full and some of the programs on it are more than a couple weeks old.

    The fool thing also goes mad now and again, pushing all the good stuff off the end of the queue by catching entire Archie Bunker & The Jeffersons marathons, no matter how many thumbs down I give them. Never had this problem with a VCR.

  • Are you able to sign up for an US based service like DirectTV? If you can sign up for such a service and select a local line up for the service that is equivalent to one available in the US, then I don't see why the TiVo service wouldn't work for you. The catch is that you may end up having to pay long distance charges if your TiVo's nightly calls can't be made locally, but this would be moot if they were to come out with an ethernet model that you could hook into your LAN (which is when I'll trade in my current TiVo).
  • Long, long, long ago, back in September 1999. (See Deja.com on this [deja.com])

    The most relevant bit of this discussion was a post from one of the Tivo engineers: All our source modifications are available on CD. You may acquire a CD by sending $24.95 to: TiVo, Inc. Attn: Richard Bullwinkle 894 Ross Drive Sunnyvale, CA 94089 We state so in our manual, as required by the GNU Public License.

  • As I understand the system, it uses a special partition format on a separate partition (or series thereof) to actually store the video. It's not in any file format, at least not a recognized one, just a long blob of MPEG data. The OS is contained on a primary FAT16 partition. This information was available on a previous link here at /., but I can't find it anywhere. I'll post it as soon as it makes itself apparent.
  • Actually, none of that is really right. The OS is on standard ext2 partitions, as is /var. The guts of the Tivo application and the mpeg data, plus the user interface graphics are stored in a filesystem called MFS (Media File System), which is something Tivo invented and is not open source. It's a strange filesystem, with 1 partition holding all the little files (graphics, apps, etc) and inodes, and 1 larger partition that holds the MPEG data. And there's plenty of other complexities that we haven't figured out yet too.. Tivo did try to start making a normal Linux filesystem driver for it, and you can see it in their released kernel code under linux-2.1/fs/mfs/, but they gave up and the code is incomplete and missing some headers (which have since been lost).

    cc
    http://tivohack.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

  • A solution for me (In New Brunswick) (Score:4)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @05:44AM (#880322)

    You can get a lot of the functionality of the TiVo with an ATI All-In-Wonder, a reasonably fast celeron box, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a huge hard drive. Admittedly, the case doesn't look as nice, but I don't mind a tower sitting by the TV that much.

    The ATI can be configured to download to a schedule, it's TV out lets you use the computer to browse/play games, you can play DVDs on it with a DVD drive with great quality, it has MPEG compression accelleration so you don't get old encoding stuff for later, and with the box, you can even play mp3's on your stereo (I center everything in the living room stereo wise).

    This combination is much more flexible than the TiVo IMHO. The only downsides are that it doesn't work on linux, so you need windows (not that bad) and it doesn't look as nice as a system component (although if you got a bookshelf PC and pearl-painted it it would look pretty cool). I'm working on a couple things to make it more tivo like, I'd like to have a server so I could program it over the net, automatically record programs of choice, and maybe a client for the palm so that you could configure what to record on the fly.

  • The one missing link.. (Score:3)

    by Dave Muench ( 21979 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @05:45AM (#880323)
    Others seem to have posted the main important links for the Tivo hacking information, but they did miss the big one - http://tivohack.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. That's the main site we maintain with the information on how to hack it.

    cc

  • Oh great. Cable London finally get round to rolling out cable modems (supposedly in October), and now I find out you can get tivo in this country, but only if you're a Sky Digital customer.

    ------------------------------

  • yea, i kinda messed up the whole post thing, i did it rather quickly. If i'd have had more time i would've mentioned it was on the Screen Savers (www.thescreensavers.com). Yea, i understand that the linux kernel is open source, and that they should've had it open anyway, but i kinda worded it wrong and left out some info. Sorry about that.. i seen the show, and then had to leave rather quickly so the post took about 30 seconds to write, forgive the little errors in it ;)
  • So you want to hack a Tivo huh?.....

    well here is your chance to get ahold of a $199 Tivo to hack on....

    Web on over to the Tivo Underground AVS Forum for the details:

    14hr Tivo for $199 from Circuit City [avsforum.com]

    I would suggest you use your Tivo for a few weeks before you hack it (to break it in).

    Take some time to get a feel for it before you "crack the hood" :-) ....

    Enjoy!

  • How would you relate the resolution and quality of the ATI encoder? Do you have a general estimate of space per secound on the highest quality setting?

    Thanks,

  • In my optinon the ATI card is extremely high quality, both in terms of codecs and the display. I've seen lots of TV tuners, but the quality of the ATI blows them all away. I don't own stock in ATI, either. (good thing, too :). In terms of what it does for the money, it can't be beat. Not too sure about space per second, never measured.

  • Ok, so, I don't like commercials. Generally. Does TiVo do anything to commercials, or does it have the ability to discriminate between a TV show and a commercial?

    An NPR listener, I am,
  • Sorry friend. A computer combined with an ATI All-In-Wonder isn't even comparable with the TiVo. It could, perhaps, given killer software, but there is no comparison today. TiVo manages to pack an incredible amount of power in a box that (gasp) my parents figured out with minutes of training, and causes no undue "family" tech support calls.

    Scenario 1: Phone rings, pick up remote, hit pause. Talk on phone for 10 minutes. Resume watching in the same place, only now you can zip though the commercials until you catch up with live TV.

    Scenario 2: Pick some guilty pleasure like "ER". Select in guide, select menu, select "get a season pass". Next thursday, get stuck at work until 8:00. Enjoy no traffic commute home and enter door at 8:20. Use John, grab beer, sit on couch, grab 1 remote, hit 3 buttons and begin watching it from the start -- screwing over the advertisers again.

    Scenario 3: Simply type the number of the channel you want.. TiVo can seamlessly blend cable boxes and sattelite dishes, so 05 gets me NBC on cable, and 975 gives me NBC on DSS..

    TiVo has changed television to me forever. It is rare something can come along that does that.
  • Sure, you just start watching shows late and then you can skip over them until you catch up to live TV.

    While it doesn't auto-skip, the 3-speed search function has a "back jump" that goes back a few seconds when you return to 1x. Once you get used to the buffer you can get through a block of commercials in 10 seconds.
  • What makes you think it would be more difficult? Its just another IDE or SCSI device right?
  • /. is "News For Nerds". I find it extreamly interesting how smart these people are to figure and reverse enginere the tivo. Is it evil to reverse enginere I guess I want to ask? I enjoy reverse enginering, and I call my self a hacker. I also program in many languages, and call my self a hacker. I don't illegaly break in to things, I just take what I know and use it to figure out what I don't. I don't see anyway that you can say that the internet is powered by a few programmers called the "h464blahblahblahX6Death". The "Open source Revolution" is powered hundreds and thousands of programmers, working together to make software. These people are the real hackers and not some sort of Counter-cluture, but are just smart people. In you post you calim that these "h3fdBlah" people are keeping out censorship, even though you wonder why this artical wasn't censored. I label you Hypocrite and a promoter of propaganda. How is Reverse Enginereing Evil? Someone answer this, I don't know how it could be evil.

  • TIVO Hacking even with windows... (Score:3)

    by AntiPasto ( 168263 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:08AM (#880334) Journal
    Here's some links to make this sort of thing real easy. I'd love to if I had the cash and watched that much TV... heheh

    http://www.avsforum.com/ubb tivo/Forum6/HTML/000012.html [avsforum.com]

    http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/For um6/HTML/004947.html [avsforum.com]

    ----

  • I cannot find out what a TiVo even is! The page with the link has a FAQ that points to tivocommunity.com but their FAQ is basically a rephrased slashdot FAQ if you're trying to find out what IMHO stands for or something.

    So could some karma whores post a few links or something?

  • Tivo (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Here's a link to the actual Tivo FAQ [tivo.com] instead of that crap they linked to...

    I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore. ...and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself. :)

    Actually, I need a device that notifies me if there's *ever* anything worth watching on TV. If that happens, I'll drop everything, see what it is, and run back home. Beating the end of the world by about 3 seconds, I'm sure.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:TiVo runs linux? GPL violation? (Score:4)

    by disarray ( 108 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:10AM (#880337)
    Indeed it has been hashed and rehashed. The kernel modifications are here:

    http://www.tivo.com/linux/ [tivo.com]

    The rest of TiVo is userland--they can license in any way they desire, much like the packages included with Linux distributions.

  • i'll map to your nads if you don't watch out.
  • For all of us poor sods that were taken in by the glitzier Replay boxes, is there an option to hack?

    I am not even sure what OS Replay is running...QNX?

    Has anyone tried hacking a replay?
  • They've even open sourced the kernel.

    Linux source is GPL'd right? So if they made modifications they have to open source those modifications. Isn't this statement a little redundant, or am I missing something?
  • Why is it that whenever a novel device is reported to be able to run Linux in some way or form, some schmuck always says "Man! A Beowulf cluster of these would be sweet!"
  • Go to www.ati.com and read about the new Radeon all-in-wonder. Comes with a Tivo-work-alike-superset application.
  • The TiVo is much more than just a device to dump shows to MPEG. It has a wonderful user interface, very good service to get the latest show info, and lets you rate what you watch and record so it can go find shows that you might like and record them when you aren't watching TV. At only $299 for the 14hour and $399 for the 30 hour, it's hard to build one for that price....if not impossible.
  • Not to troll or anything, but this was on Slashdot quite a long time ago. I thought it was pretty funny when I saw it on The Screen Savers (ZDTV) last night that they were doing a re-run of Slashdot. (They did the I-Opener hack two or so weeks ago.) But to see this back on Slashdot today is quite an eye opener. Slashdot getting it's news from ZDTV!

    disapointing is an understatement!

  • You want answers?! -- We Got Answers.... (Score:3)

    by init 6 ( 171626 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @04:24AM (#880345)
    First of all.....

    This whole story should be marked Redundant.......

    Tivo Hacking is nothing new, Slashdot it recycling old news articles, man - what is with this place lately?!

    A quick search of "Tivo + Hacking" found the following on slashdot (the June 22nd article is nearly a duplicate of this current one) *sigh*:

    More Tivo Hacking by CmdrTaco on Friday August 04, @08:45AM EDT

    Hacking The Tivo by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 22, @09:37AM EDT

    Tivo Hacking? by Cliff on Monday April 24, @09:32AM EDT

    I own a Tivo and LOVE it! I did not really truely understand nor appreciate the full benefit and goodness a Tivo can provide until I owned one myself (for nearly a year now). I would not want to watch TV again without it.

    Buy one (*buy from a place that has a money back guarantee - I think Tivo may have a 30 day MBG) and see for yourself.

    For those of you who want to know more about Tivo go here:
    http://www.tivo.com/ [tivo.com]

    and here:
    http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi [avsforum.com]

    You will find alot more useful information at these places than on /. [And that includes HACKING it]

    Enjoy!

  • If you read the stuff these guys are not "Breaking in" but upgrading their Tivo whatnots. This as far as I can tell only voids their warrantys. So what are you talking about? BTW Hacker is being used here in its orignal sense. What you call hackers are really crackers.
  • Screw it - if I don't have to respect copyright laws, I don't have to respect the GPL either.

    --

  • Oh, that does sound more right. I think you're a lot closer than I was. Any chance you found links too? :)
  • This looks cool... According to the FAQ [ati.com], there are Linux drivers available for the thing. Any ideas on the status of Linux support?

    Also, any ideas on using a remote control with it?
  • I had the same problem until I found that the FAQ at tivocommunity actually points to another FAQ at www.tivo.com [tivo.com]:

    (From the faq:)
    "TiVo is the most advanced and easy-to-use personal TV service available. But don't take our word for it. Our approach has won thumbs up approval by reviewers from major business, technology, consumer electronics, and home entertainment publications. TiVo digitally records television shows, without videotape, so you can watch what you want, when you want. The TiVo service allows you to control your TV viewing in ways never before possible-now you can pause, slow motion, or instant replay live TV. Or, with the simple click of a button, you can tell TiVo to automatically find and record your favorite programs every time they air-so you won't ever miss a moment of great TV again. You can even tell TiVo what you like and don't like, so it can suggest other shows you may want to record and watch, based on your interests."
  • Windows runs?
  • sure, strap the case to your back, get a REALLY BIG battery, and find a convenient high school track... there ya go!
  • Links? I'm cc, I was the first to get the upgrade to work. :)

  • how far are we from not needing the service?

    What you propose is probably possible, but if you are getting program information from a separate source you would have to throw away the TiVo user interface completely. Most of the TiVo interface is built around the TV program's metadata (ie: actors, genre, when the program was made), which ClickTV may not be able to provide. Even if they could, it's not clear that you could easily map it (and maintain that map) to whatever TiVo's internal format is. So I would bet that you would have to abandon the TiVo's software and UI almost entirely, and substitute your own.

    That would be a shame, because (1) TiVo designed an outstanding UI, and (2) most of the benefit of using TiVo (I've had one for a few months now) is in the interface and the TiVo service beyond the schedule information. Once it notices that you watch a lot of, e.g., Science Fiction shows, it starts recording other ones you might like in any free space it has. It makes suggestions based on what you've watched of other stuff you might like. It reminds you of recording conflicts when you schedule them, and does reasonably good priortization if you give it lots to record. Plus, it is a work in progress: it has an extremely active user community (check out the AVS Forum TiVo discussion group [avsforum.com]) that TiVo actually pays attention to, and it shows in the design. So if you are looking to hack it just to have a digital VCR, I'd wait, or get Replay instead (assuming *it* works in Canada). If you are interested in hacking it to avoid paying for the service, you'll be avoiding (IMHO) exactly what makes the device worth owning in the first place

  • The TiVo people want you buying hardware from them, not building it yourself,

    Actually, the TiVo people have little reason to care about this. They don't sell hardware, they simply license their software and system specs to other manufacturers.

    Phillips and Sony, now those are the folks have reason to be miffed about this. Although, it's hard to feel sympathy for them, especially after the "Upgrade Program" that Phillips had for awhile. It basically consisted of adding 15 GB of disk to your TiVo for a mere $300. (15 GB of disk was retailing for around $100 at the time.)

  • Are you trying to tell me it costs 25$ to make a CD? Umm, CD-R's are about 1$US; it takes 5 minutes (if that) to burn one; and USPS Priority Mail is about 3$ to anywhere in the TiVo serviced area. CD mastering houses make CDs for pennies -- I know because I've ordered custom pressed CDs.

    So, please justify the 25$ "media cost"? Just how much is that intern being paid to burn CDs?

    Last time I checked, the FSF was charging a small fortune [gnu.org] for media packs. It's one of the ways they make the money they need to stay afloat. Remember, "free software" only implies free as in "free speech," not necessarily "free beer" (though the free-beer part is handled by dozens of FTP sites and websites).

    If you don't want to fork over $25 for the TiVo CD, the same stuff is available on their website [tivo.com].

    _/_
    / v \
    (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
    \_^_/

  • Well, that's good to hear.. At least we all now know exactly why it was that Sky never DID get the timeshift planner working. Making sure we all had to go out and buy the TiVo box! I for one don't really care too much (but it would have been nice to be able to time shift for the couple of years in between!), I would have bought the TiVo anyway! In fact, gimme two, no three!
  • We need hot-swappable hard drives for the TiVo, so that we can trade them or store them, etc. Either that, or the ability to dump a piece of the movie on a CD in some (open) format that everyone can read.

    --

  • If you can add more disk space I can't imagine it would be that much harder to add a CD-RW as well.. That would be pretty handy.
  • With all this hacking, is it possible yet to grab the MPEG files the TIVO generates? Or are the drives unreadable on typical systems? Is anyone making a Linux hack to support the TIVO file system if it is not the norm?

  • Re:Here's what we need. (Score:3)

    by Omega996 ( 106762 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:13AM (#880361)
    Firewire!
  • Get out of your little bubble you call utopia, dry yourself off and recount the various slashdot articles about companies using opensource code and not releasing the changes.

    Big companies don't care. They believe they can get away with it, as long as people don't know. Specially since the gpl has yet to be tried in court(Or isn't it right now?).

  • Re:Tivo (Score:3)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong&gmail,com> on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:19AM (#880363) Homepage
    I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore. ...and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself. :)

    Oh, come on. Surely it's worth $300 to be able to watch every episode of the Simpsons that's on on every channel every day, right? :-)

    I'm not kidding, either. It is worth it.
    --
  • mod this up
  • It's a running joke. Like Windows, except funnier.

  • Re:No. (Score:1)

    by RedX ( 71326 )
    At only $299 for the 14hour and $399 for the 30 hour, it's hard to build one for that price....if not impossible

    Actually Circuit City is offering the 14-hour Philips model for $199 after $100 rebate. And many online vendors are selling the 30-hour version for under $350. A 20-hour version should hit the market in the next month or so to fill the low-end market(thus the beginning of 14-hour clearances), and a 60-hour version should be out sometime this fall for around $699. Adding a 30 gig hard drive to the 14-hour and 30-hour units adds 38 hours, so that would easily be the most cost-effective route to the high-end. Keep in mind that these hours are based on the highest-compression levels, you sacrifice storage space when you use higher-quality recording.

  • Disclaimer: I work for Sky but not on the Tivo project and am speaking for myself, not for them.

    I can't see this affecting the launch of Tivo by Sky. They're very unlikely to care about anyone hacking the box - it's very much a minority pursuit and will obviously invalidate the guarantee. If you modify the disks and the kernel on your Tivo, you're on your own. Sky is pretty excited about Tivo and isn't likely to let something like this delay the launch. I seriously doubt that Sky management have even heard about these Tivo hacks.

    HH
  • You can get a secret ReplayTV information screen by entering:

    411 Zones

    on your remote. The most interesting thing is the list of recognized drives at the bottom of the screen. Of course, it lists the Quantum drive as disk 1, but disks 2 through 4 aren't there. It seems the software is completely ready to handle upto 3 more drives.

    This makes me wonder if there's another secret menu that will make it reformat secondary drives?
  • The sad thing though, is that while hacking the Tivo represents the classical definition of hacking (i.e. making hardware do something useful it wasn't necessarily intended to do), it will be reported, and seen by the media as, the new version of hacking (i.e. evil, criminal, breaking and entering type activity). The TiVo people want you buying hardware from them, not building it yourself, so they're going to use the 'h' word in its negative conotation when they report this...
  • Here are some other Tivo releated links. I bought one a couple of months ago, but returned it because of the $9.95/mo charge for their TV guide service that's needed to have it record without being very painful. That's just too much for that little functionality.

    Photos of what is inside Tivo:
    http://www.9thtee.com/InsideTiVo.htm

    Downloadable Linux kernel from the Tivo site:
    http://www.tivo.com/linux/
  • As I understand it (and I've not yet decompiled my TiVo), their MFS is basically a "really big file" much like an Oracle database on a partition. The MFS kernel part is just the linkage between the userland applications and the drive -- it's based off NFS with "the networking removed" (there's files in the tree explaining this.) Personally, I think this is a perfect way to do this sort of thing.

    The thing needs a network interface (how expensive is a controller chip? 6$?) and a FireWire/USB connector. That last bit would be a problem for the version of linux they are using, but seeing as they've designed all sorts of custom ASICs, this shouldn't be a problem.

    The TiVo is a great creation, but it isn't perfect. (Not by a long shot.)
  • Does anybody know if the TiVO can support digital audio either input or output?

    I have a nice 5.1 setup at home and I get digital from my cable box. I hate giving that up when I use VHS and I was wondering if the Tivo does it better

  • Re:I hate to ask (Score:3)

    by deeny ( 10239 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @07:55AM (#880373) Homepage
    There's more subtle things about the TiVo service that people don't necessarily know.

    TiVo is random access. Those with VCRs are somewhat inured to the fact that they have to fast forward and rewind. With a TiVo, you have immediate access to the start of a show. Any show. You can delete them in any order.

    What if the same episode is shown twice in one week? TiVo knows (having tagged each episode as unique) and records one. We see this with Xena all the time (now that we have TiVo, Rick is watching Xena again).

    What if the show moves? On a VCR, you'd have to reprogram it. TiVo will still record the show (but there may be conflicts if you wanted to record two shows at once). Note that last-minute moves it won't know about, but if it's a scheduled move, it will.

    For years, I wanted interactive television listings while surfing. Even when I had Primestar, I didn't have that. TiVo gives me that, even on an antenna-only connection.

    ObDisclaimer: I work for TiVo.

    _Deirdre
  • I don't know about you, but my changes and adjustments will be sent back to TiVo. Heck, all the modifications are out in the open so who's to say TiVo cannot wire them into their next update?

    Adding a drive to your TiVo voids your warantee, so TiVo shouldn't care as long as you don't bug them when your TiVo melts. The drive(s) you add are not the same type in there from the factory. I don't know of many IDE drives that can take the kind of continuous use the TiVo throws at it. I would have gone with SCSI, but I understand the cost reasons for IDE. (Personally, I give the TiVo drive about two years.) And what happens when the power randomly goes out or I just unplug it (there's no reset button, power switch, or "halt" button)?
  • Sorry, no digital support. It's got standard SVHS/Composite video inputs and right/left RCA stereo inputs.
  • Are you trying to tell me it costs 25$ to make a CD? Umm, CD-R's are about 1$US; it takes 5 minutes (if that) to burn one; and USPS Priority Mail is about 3$ to anywhere in the TiVo serviced area. CD mastering houses make CDs for pennies -- I know because I've ordered custom pressed CDs.

    So, please justify the 25$ "media cost"? Just how much is that intern being paid to burn CDs?
  • Actually, many of us are using the same type drives that come from the factory. Contrary to popular belief, Tivo isn't using custom drives. Pop a Quantum lct.10 30 gig in (which is what the newer 30 hour units come with stock) and it'll show up as having Quickview and Tivo extensions. The Tivo just knows how to turn them on.
  • Interesting question. I'll have to look at the chip specs to see if it is even possible. This might require different microcode or different controll settings. I'll get back to ya. :-)
  • Actually, they are anything but first. We figured out how to add the disk at the end of June.
  • The Tivo's today don't. The upcoming DirecTivo combination Tivo and DirecTV reciever does support dolby digital..
  • Currently I've seen no software that does what the Tivo Does. Which is; Obtain a TV-Guide like listing, Record shows that you tell it to record, Record shows similar to what you like by genre, thespian, director, etc.

    I agree that the TV-tuner card will obsolete the Tivo in the long haul. Conversely we'll need to see some well developed agent-ware designed for the cards, as well as get our heads out of the one-box-one-function frame of mind the average consumer is renowned for.

    As for the TV box, what i do with my Tivo is, use the dump to tape function to archive stuff to my 'set-top-box' (piii/256MB-RAM/75GB EIDE/500mhz/haupage-win-tv/100mbps ether/dvd-ram/winbloze98) and write it to dvd-ram in playable format(avi/mpg/asf), or squirt it up the lan to my Sun Ultra-1 w/ 500GB array for future viewing purposes. This process is far from being automated.

    Thanks for the info on 'hacking the tivo' 30hours of "crap quality video" or 9 hours of tolerable quality is just not enough space for somone who catches a weeks worth of science fiction and news every saturday...

  • Not to mention the press release, which says that they'll have radeon driver support for linux -
    =]

    http://www.ati.com/na/pages/corporate/press/2000 /4295.html

    to all idiot moderators- the faq says all-in-wonder, not radeon... so this is NOT reduntant

  • Deja Vu (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought we all read about this months ago. BREAKING NEWS! TIVO HACKED TODAY! .....right
  • These hacks are fun for the people who do them.
    Why? The best reason of them all because I can.
  • A jaz hooked to the sucker would be great.

  • Re:I hate to ask (Score:4)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong&gmail,com> on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:23AM (#880387) Homepage
    So could some karma whores post a few links or something?

    I'm not a karma whore, but I'll post an explanation anyway (I don't know of any links).

    A TiVo is basically a set-top box which downloads TV listings every night (at 3 am by default) and then records shows it thinks you'll like (or that you've told it to record). For example, if you tell it to record the Simpsons every night, it might realize that you like that type of show and start recording Futurama and Family Guy as well. You can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down for each show it records, and it uses your ratings to judge what shows to record in the future.

    It's also useful for watching live TV, because it'll tell you a brief explanation of what episode of each show is on, so you can know if you've seen it and not have to wait to find out (and maybe even go out and do something better :-)

    I've fallen in love with these things - it's damn nice to be able to be out all evening and get home and be able to watch 3 episodes of the Simpsons and an episode of X-Files before bed :-)
    --
  • I stand at the television and knock. He who finds the remote and watches Letterman shall find nothing better to tape.

  • What about us foreigners? (Score:3)

    by Merk ( 25521 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:29AM (#880389) Homepage

    I live in Canada where you can't buy a TiVo, and even if you could you couldn't get the service. I really love the TiVo concept -- never searching for a blank tape when you want to record something, never waiting around to find the start of a show. And that doesn't even mention what the service gets you -- automatic recording of your favourite shows without having to even know when they're on.

    But unfortunately I can't buy a TiVo or get the service here. But maybe soon that won't matter. I can easily buy one in the US and bring it over. I'm pretty sure you can use it as a fancy VCR even if you don't have the service. I've considered doing this already. The main sticking point is the service.

    Last time I talked to the TiVo rep who frequents all the discussion groups he said they had no plans to move into Canada. If they did I'd worry that a TiVo I bought in the US and brought over wouldn't work with the Canadian service once they introduce it here, but as it stands I guess that's not an issue.

    So I might just go get one of these babies soon. But I wonder -- if you can get a BASH prompt on these things, modify the hard drive, and do everything else these guys currently do, how far are we from not needing the service? Ideally I'd like to exchange the modem in the box for an Ethernet card, add the TiVo to my home LAN, and let it use ClickTV [clicktv.com] for listings.

    Now am I dreaming? Anybody think this is easy? Anybody think it's impossible?

  • Lets just pray all this doesn't push back the release of the TiVo that is being released for Sky digital satellite in the UK. Of course, once it has been released, we'll have all this again as all us brits sit and hack the box! Now, lets get nat, ipf and routing going on it, and it can be our house router as well :)
  • OK, let's clear this up once and for all. The TiVo is NOT a good platform to try to turn into an MP3 player.

    All of the MPEG work that the TiVo does is handled by dedicated chips. The decoder is an IBM CS22. A quick look at this page [ibm.com] lets us know that it will decode layers 1 and 2, but not three. So, playing MP3's through the decoder chip is out.

    So, how about doing it in software? Well, the processor in the box is a PowerPC G03GCX. Taking a quick glance at this document [ibm.com] tells us that it is capable of running at 50, 66, or 80 MHz. Hmm... so which is it? Browsing through the log files on the TiVo itself informs us that the kernel is detecting the processor running at 53 MHz (on my box). Not quite the sort of horsepower you want for decoding MP3's.

    Really, if you want a dedicated MP3 player, building one from a cheap leftover Pentium 200 box would be a much simpler solution, and give you a much better end result.
  • It costs $25 to have Tivo's high-paid engineers prepare an ISO image and put it onto a CD.

    This issue was hashed over repetitively a year ago; head to the Deja site and read through the blathering about "how that price is too high" if you find that a useful use of your time.

  • Well, obviously your TiVo shouldn't crash, but the only way it would delete your specifically requested shows to make room for Archie Bunker & The Jeffersons is if you had told it to record those shows... OTOH, your comments about giving those shows thumbs-downs imply that TiVo is recording Archie Bunker & The Jeffersons on its own as TiVo Suggestions. If so, TiVo Suggestions never delete things you specifically asked TiVo to record, in which case your TiVo wouldn't delete "all the good stuff". Basically, I find your two comments hard to reconcile. They may be funny, but they paint an inaccurate and negative picture of how a TiVo actually works. My TiVos are always full. I've left things on them for six months. My TiVos don't crash. If yours crashes regularly, something is wrong. Feel free to stop by http://www.tivocommunity.com for help. I help moderate the Help Center over there. /jab
  • Actually I think that if there is *ever* anything worth watching on TV it will just be scheduled. The end of the world will be at some point in the thirty seconds leading up to the start of the show, when all of America is sitting on the edge of their seats, preparing to finally enjoy something....


    BTW, if I see a shadow creature moving around on my LCD screen does that mean that I should walk away from the computer for a while?
  • There is a similiarity between Oracle using a raw partition and MFS, in that MFS is a filesystem built entirely in user space. It has a daemon (MfsDaemon) that controls access to it, other programs connect to this to access things. As far as the kernel though, no. MFS is entirely user space. The only thing that might be kernel related at all is the MFS daemon knows how to talk to their modified IDE drivers (which are released under the GPL) to prioritize it's reads/writes higher than the normal OS read/writes on the ext2 partitions. That's one reason why the video doesn't skip when it's doing housekeeping on it's database. The fs/mfs/* files in their kernel release are really a red herring. The engineers at Tivo a while back tried to make MFS mountable like any file system by basically hacking the NFS client to be a MFS client. But they decided it was going to be a royal pain and gave up. That mfs kernel client isn't compiled into the kernel on the Tivo, and in fact, is incomplete and won't compile at all.
  • Actually, it would be _significantly_ more difficult. I wouldn't count on it happening.

    cc

  • Interesting info. I was assuming it wouldn't be too hard to map ClickTV data to whatever format TiVo expects. I still think it shouldn't be *that* hard. ClickTV has actors, directors, genre, year, as well as episode title, a rerun flag, etc.

    My main thing isn't trying to avoid paying for the service. Afterall, it's not that expensive, $200 or so for a lifetime subscription? The main problem is that I simply can't get the service without paying long distance charges, and those could *really* stack up quickly. I've considered Replay but to me the features set of TiVo far outweighs it. Good points though. I guess the service is a lot more than just making sure it gets The Simpsons correctly.

  • TiVo is random access. Those with VCRs are somewhat inured to the fact that they have to fast forward and rewind. With a TiVo, you have immediate access to the start of a show. Any show. You can delete them in any order.

    But since it uses a hard drive, I didn't feel it was necessary to point this out :-)

    What if the same episode is shown twice in one week? TiVo knows (having tagged each episode as unique) and records one. We see this with Xena all the time (now that we have TiVo, Rick is watching Xena again).

    This I didn't know. That's phat.

    ObDisclaimer: I work for TiVo.

    LOL.
    --
  • TiVo was originally announced with firewire support, but they removed it to save $30. I would have been more interested in buying a TiVo or ReplayTV with firewire.
    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
  • The ZDTV show "The Screen Savers" did a segment on this very subject last night. The writeup will be at thier site today sometime. I know the Screen Savers folks are Slashdot readers, since half their daily pool seem to come from /. , I'm sure they will get a kick out of being first for once.
  • Does the TiVo run a straight forward linux implementation, or have they modified various GPLed drivers and applications for their own use?

    Shouldn't they be publishing the code they build on top of GPLed code? Or has this been hashed and rehashed to death on /. before?

    the AC

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