Bashed my Tivo

So all this Tivo talk made me start thinking about hacking mine some more. So far I’ve added an 80 Gig hard drive along side the original 30 Gig, and installed a TurboNet network card. On Tuesday night, I decided to go forward with the ultimate hack and get a bash prompt on my Tivo. This involved removing the original Tivo hard drive, hooking it up to Kara’s computer and booting up from a Linux CD. I was then able to copy some utilities onto the Tivo hard drive and tweak some settings. I put the hard drive back into the Tivo, hooked it back up to the TV and turned it on. Everything worked as normal, but now I was able to telnet to Tivo!!! And with that door wide open, I can do pretty much anything I want. I’ve installed an ftp server, TivoWebPlus, and TyTool and I’m loving every minute of it.

TivoWebPlus is a web server that exports all of Tivo’s information and functionality (minus the actual playing of the recordings) to a website. I can’t even get close to describing how rad this is. I’m now able to control the on screen menus of Tivo from my computer, manage my shows while watching something on TV, and TONS of other nice little tweaks. I no longer have to find the remote if I want to watch something while at the computer… I can just bring up the site and control everything from there!

TyTool is a video extraction program... As I type this, I’m pulling the Towlie episode of South Park off the Tivo and onto my computer hard drive. It’s kind of a slow process (looks like the raw dump of the 30 minute episode will be over a gigabyte!) but who cares? It’s functionality that I never had before. I don’t see myself pulling that many shows off, but now I can if I want to. And the SP ep is the perfect example because it’s something that I want to keep, but it’s been using up Tivo hd space since last November. Now I’ll be able to save it on my computer, and erase it from Tivo!