Customer Reviews

TiVo Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I really enjoyed Google Hacks, and was really excited when I heard about this new Hacks book. I was, however disappointed when I actually got my hands on it.

This book touts 100 "hacks" but once you get into it, you will discover that many of these "hacks" are really just steps - instructions if you will, and that many of them rely on other "hacks." For instance, the steps involved in removing the cover from your TiVo (a few screws) counts as a "hack." There are several more like this.

The book seems to have been forced into the O'Reilly Hacks format, and probably would have been better were it freed up a bit.

The description says its 288 pages, but in fact it really only has 239 pages of what they are calling "hacks" and with 100 hacks in the book, you can see that there is on average less than 2.5 pages of coverage per "hack." I'm not saying that each "hack" is only 2.5 pages, many are larger, but I think you can see that the coverage is light. I was very disappointed that many of the "hacks" were no more than a single page telling me to download and install a piece of code from the web.

The writing style is fine, but I did get the feeling the author might not be extremely knowledgable in the TiVo space. There were several places where he had the opportunity to mention some of the real "gotchas" when working with TiVo drives and the like, but came up short. With all the contributors, I wonder if he acted a bit more as editor than author.

So, if you are looking for something with a little more meat to it, look elsewhere.

There is very little to no new information in this book that is not available online. Check out http://www.tivocommunity.com. If you are good enough to do an upgrade/hack you are good enough to find the information on your own.

The majority of the book is working the TiVo at the operating system level to alter the software or to transfer movies. This is advanced stuff that requires a good deal of technical skill. The first chapter of the book does have some hacks that are done from the interface itself, like enabling the advanced season pass. The second chapter covers adding more disk space to your TiVo. Then beyond that you get into the advanced topics; putting your TiVo on your network, changing the software, transferring movies around, and then authoring code for the TiVo.

The book is very focused. The text is well written and the graphics are used effectively. The section on adding disk space is very well done and is better than anything I have read on the web for doing the same type of work.

I recommend this book for people who are familiar with Linux and hardware hacking and are interested in extending their TiVos. For just the average TiVo user you may want to review the table of contents to make sure that you are getting enough out of your purchase.

This is the perfect book if you bought your tivo brand new over two years ago and have not upgraded to series 2. Alot of the Hacks are Hints and Tricks you already know if you are an experienced Tivo user of at least one day. It is pretty much useless for Series 2 Tivo's. I will be returning mine and buy the von hagen book. Shame on you O'reilly, usually you put out really good books.

Book contains lots of hacks, but lacks clarity. Writing seems muddled at times, and instructions for hacks such as backing up TiVo's disk and adding a new disk are unclear/confusing (at best). Although I've not been a TiVo hacker, I do build & repair PCs as a business (and dabble in LINUX)...so I consider myself to be somewhat knowledgable.

Ultimately, the book disappointed me. I shall keep searching for one that's clear, accurate and useful.

When the TiVo personal video recorder (PVR) first hit the market in 1999, TV viewers quickly learned a whole new way to watch their favorite programs. The TiVo device represents a sea change in television, far beyond what happened when VCR technology first began to develop.

In addition to its recording capabilities, TiVo will also let you control "live" TV, slip time, set up a television firewall, set up "season passes" to your favorite television series, integrate a high degree of technological intelligence in the device, set up wish lists, and record TV programs without videotape.

The TiVo device is actually a carefully tweaked desktop computer with a television tuner card. Instead of a Pentium or Athlon processor, the original TiVo is an IBM PowerPC 403GCX-based embedded system. It uses standard IDE hard drives, with custom MPEG-2 encoding/decoding hardware, a modem, and an infrared receiver. On the outside, it's running a Linux kernel. Everything the TiVo does, save the TV channel tuning and the video encoding, is done in software. Everything you see on the screen, all the interactivity through the remote and the recording schedule is all defined in code.

However, not all the TiVos are the same. The original TiVo, the Series 1, is the most hackable TiVo, a box thrown together with commodity parts. The TiVo code is running on open hardware. If you feel like it, you can throw the TiVo software out and just home brew your own code from the bottom up.

The Series 2 TiVo, the most commonly sold TiVo today, is not as open. To lock down the platform, TiVo, Inc. has started to add some "secrets" under the hood. While TiVo is not against people hacking their platform, they do have a media service to run, and they don't want people to freely play around with some of the stuff they intend to make money on down the road.

With the prevalence of TiVo devices, it is little wonder that we see an equally strong interest in finding ways to hack, or modify the device. The most common community of TiVo hackers on the Internet can be found at www.tivocommunity.com. Author Krikorian has assembled some of the more useful, interesting, and cool hacks found in this community, as well as on his own.

There are hardware hacks, requiring you to pop the top off your TiVo and fiddle about with the innards. There are also software hacks, requiring a little less manual dexterity but no less of a sense of adventure. And, for the faint of heart, there are remote control hacks you can do from the comfort of your favorite armchair.

There are also 2 types of hacks you will NOT find here. The first are those that circumvent having to pay for TiVo. There are a few open source projects out there, like MythTV that do the same things the TiVo does, but you don't have to pay a monthly fee or a single lifetime fee to get to use it. Instead, this service queries the Internet for those valuable tidbits of information on when and what channel your television shows are on.

The second type of hacks you will NOT see involve getting to the software insides of that new and shiny Series 2 box. Most TiVo hacking has been and continues to be done on the older and more open Series 1 box. There are those who have managed to gain access to the internals of the Series 2 box, opening it up to many of the hacks available to the Series 1 box. Unfortunately, these go beyond the scope of this book, are tricky, and are of questionable legality. Series 2 owners wishing to go beyond the remote control hacks and hard drive upgrades will most likely find newer hacks for Series 2 boxes appearing online over time.

Be sure you are aware of the clearly worded warranty statement when you get your TiVo -- "Do not open or you will void your warranty." If you open your TiVo, you will not be able to send your TiVo to TiVo, Inc., if a problem later develops. If this is of little concern to you, then by all means, open this marvelous book, open your TiVo, and start exploring these 100 tips and tricks to hacking your TiVo.

Summary of Table of Contents

The 100 TiVo hacks are organized into 7 chapters, including the following:

1 - TiVo Remote Control Hacks
2 - Adding More Hours
3 - The TiVo Shell
4 - Bring the Internet to TiVo
5 - TiVo and the Web
6 - Working with Videos
7 - Writing Code

Key Topics Covered

TiVo Hacks give users personalized control of their TiVo. This book explains how to:

Use your remote control to activate the 30-second skip to blaze through commercials, enable advanced wishlists, push fast-forward to the limit, and open the backdoor to further hacks

Upgrade your TiVo's hard drive for all the recording time you want

Log in to the TiVo command line for access to programming data

Display caller-ID on your television, present digital slide shows, and play MP3s

Use TiVo on your home network to schedule recordings, access lists of recorded shows, and display your preferred programming on your web site

Write your own TiVo programs in Tcl and C

Access TiVo's Media Filesystem for programmatic access to show details - actors, directors, Thumbs-Up ratings, and more

Book Contents

280 pages; preface; figures; tables; tips; index; cover colophon

Author

Raffi Krikorian

About the Author

Raffi Krikorian is an unapologetic TiVo lover and digital plumber. If you look hard enough, you can usually find him putting together a hack for some random and stray idea that sidetracked him from the last project or stray idea. He freely admits that his serious television addiction is probably getting between him and his goal of finally graduating from MIT for the second time, although he claims it's getting better. When he's not studying or watching TV, you can find him wandering around or trying something new. In whatever time is left, he tends to his wasted bits on his weblog, www.bitwaste.com/wasted-bits.

ISBN

August 2003 First Edition
0-596-00553-9

List Price

$24.95
$38.95 CAN

This is an awesome book, plain and simple. I have read many articles on hacking the Tivo, but this book is by far the best written on the topic. Just by flipping through the book, you are able to pick something out and do it with minimal effort and mental taxation. It is very nicely laid out, and very easy to understand.

On thing that TiVo Hacks does a great job doing is explaining 100 cool things that you can do with your TiVo both outside the box and under the cover. Some of the things can even be done just by using your remote control! I have found many of the hacks on the Internet, but there were many more items in the book than I had found in my online searches. For instance, the book explains how to do the 30 second skip, add more space to your TiVo for longer recording, create a web interface, and activate on-screen caller ID!

However, there is one thing I wish this book had incorporated. In case you didn't know, there are two different series of TiVo's in existence: Series 1 and Series 2. I have a DirecTV TiVo, which is not a normal TiVo. I know that there are some differences between it and a normal TiVo, but I am not sure what they are. I was hoping that the writers would spend some time talking about the different variations, but there was nothing in the book touching on the subject.

Taking it all in, I would recommend this book to anyone with a TiVo. The numerous hacks it describes are great at stretching the TiVo's abilities. The remote control hacks alone are fun, cool, and very handy to have, even if you never plan on taking the cover off. This alone makes the book valuable to even the casual TiVo user.

This is exactly the same book that I purchased several years ago, despite the 2009 date info. Like it or not, the TiVo Series 1 and 2 are obsolete. I can't believe that there are absolutely no remote codes or software tweaks that are compatible with newer TiVo models. If the author and/or publisher can't find any new material for this book, what's the point?

Tivo is a software service, coupled with a digital video recorder, which changes the way one watches TV. O'Reilly's "Tivo Hacks", part of their outstanding "Hacks" series, explores how to tinker with these magical little boxes. "Tivo Hacks" follows the same format as the other titles in the "Hacks" series. Each chapter is an enumerated series of tips and tricks that will have your Tivo doing summersaults by the time you're finished going through all of them.

It is the first two chapters that the vast majority of Tivo owners will find the most useful. The first chapter explores hacks that may be performed with the remote control. This includes such hacks as the indispensable "30-Second Skip" hack, the powerful "Enabling Advanced WishLists" hack, and the why-would-you-ever-want-to-do-this "Italicizing Everything" hack.

The second chapter carefully details how to add more hours to your Tivo. This section carefully walks the more intrepid souls through removing and installing the necessary hard drives, backing up your original drives, and making your new drives Tivo-friendly. "Tivo Hacks" carefully explains each task step-by-step, as well as detailing the tools and materials you will need. The book certainly makes what may seem a daunting procedure very doable.

Tivo is essentially a Linux box. The remaining chapters offer hacks which exploit this fact, and these are definitely for the more technically minded. Herein we find out how to work with Tivo's shell, how to install software on Tivo, how to get Tivo speaking to other computers, how to bring the Internet to Tivo, and many more things that expand the capabilities of your Tivo. The book concludes with a chapter on writing and compiling code for Tivo. As in the first two chapters, each hack is carefully explained and due caution is clearly noted where applicable. Example code for hacks is given in Perl, Tcl, and C.

The author does a fine job throughout in making each hack clear and understandable. If you fancy yourself a bit of a hacker, then after reading this book you should feel comfortable undertaking any of these hacks.

Is this book for you? Well, if you have a Series 2 Tivo, really only the first two chapters are of much interest. The Series 1 boxes are much more "hackable" than the newer Series 2 boxes, and as a result the majority of the rest of the hacks will not work on the Series 2. This book, certainly beyond the first chapter at least, requires a certain level of technical ability, and as such is not for your average Tivo owner. In other words, I probably wouldn't purchase a copy as a gift for Uncle Irwin and Aunt Martha to go along with their shiny new Tivo. On the other hand, if you fit the target audience and want to get the most out of your Tivo, particularly if you want to expand the number of hours in your Tivo, this book will certainly come in handy. While you can certainly find most of the information in this book on the Internet, there is definitely something to be said for having it all in one place so that you may easily flip through it and reference it.

I have not read the other tivo books yet, but I think this one is pretty good. Yes, you can get all the information online from the forums, but this book does a nice job of organizing it all in one place that you can flip through in your leisure. I found the pictures helpful too. The other reviewers seemed a bit harsh on this book, but maybe since I borrowed it from the library, I'm a bit more forgiving.