TiVo Hacks

Preface

Forget all you think you know about watching television. Throw out the concepts of channels and lineups. VCR+ codes, your daily paper’s TV listings, even the ubiquitous TV Guide need not apply. Primetime is a ghost of television’s past.

Secede from the tyranny of the TV grid. Gone are the Sunday evenings scouring program listings, mapping out the viewing week ahead. An end to nightly feats of conflict resolution, balancing sitcoms and series against football games and specials. A mind free of cryptic codes, formerly the only way of distinguishing between new and repeat, original and syndicated. No worries about that show you forgot to record; chances are your recorder didn’t. No longer do your viewing habits dictate your social life. And, best yet, never lay eyes upon a video tape again.

The TiVo is a personal video recorder (PVR), and it represents a sea change in television, far beyond the mere VCR-replacement suggested by its moniker. In addition to its recording capabilities, TiVo boasts the following abilities and features:

Control “live” TV: PVRs are always recording whatever you happen to be watching. Rewind to catch a line missed during a particularly loud sneeze, or pause for a leisurely visit to the bathroom rather than crossing your legs and dashing during a commercial break. This is probably the most popularized, yet least interesting, feature of PVRs.
Time slipping: Watch your favorite shows when you want to, rather than being subjected to the network executives’ assigned, network-allotted time slot. Line up an evening’s programming for your own personal “primetime.”
The television firewall: Focus your children’s television habit on interesting, educational, and age-appropriate shows, rather than whatever happens to flow past on any one particular channel. Skip those commercials or, better yet, choose programming from commercial-free channels. Lock out inappropriate channels and shows.
Season Passes: Tell TiVo to record every episode of your favorite show, no matter when or where it appears. Choose to include reruns, or ignore all but the freshest episodes.
Intelligence: VCRs are stupid creatures. Changes in programming lineup, available space, preferences for what to keep and what to ditch, and so forth go straight over their heads. The TiVo records the show, not the time slot. If your favorite show is airing at a different night this week or at a slightly different time, TiVo will catch that.
WishLists and searching: TiVo’s WishList functionality allows you to find and record something even when you don’t quite know what it is—actor, director, partial title—you’re looking for.
Record without videotape: Reclaim drawer and closet space by ridding your household of the bushels of mislabeled, half-chewed video tapes. Plus, VCR recording quality is awful. PVRs encode digitally, offering either tunable quality or encoding at the highest quality available to them from the cable or satellite. While PVRs do indeed have a space limit, you’ll seldom find yourself worrying about recording space when you go out of town for a week and don’t want to miss your soaps. And, of course, that space limit isn’t a hard limit, thanks to hard drive upgrades.

“It will change the way you watch TV!” is the rallying cry of the evangelical group of TiVo fanatics. You bump into these people at parties and get-togethers, trying to convince others that they have to get a TiVo, or inviting perfect strangers into their homes just to give a demonstration on how it all works.

But hacking the TiVo? Hacking a closed box that just sits under my television? Why would I ever want to do that? Or, more importantly, how do I go about doing that? That question is best answered by explaining what is under the hood.

What Is a TiVo?

You can think of the TiVo as a carefully tweaked desktop computer with a television tuner card. Instead of a Pentium or an Athlon, 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 IR receiver. On the inside, it’s running a Linux kernel. Everything the TiVo does, save the television 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 scheduling is all defined in code.

But not all TiVos are the same. The original TiVo, the Series 1, is the most hackable TiVo out there; it’s a box thrown together with commodity parts. The TiVo code is running on open hardware. If you feel like it, you can throw that TiVo software out the window and just home brew your own code from the bottom up. That might be a little excessive, but you get my drift.

The Series 2 TiVo, the most commonly sold TiVo today, unfortunately 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.

How to Use This Book

Hacks are generally considered quick-n-dirty, pragmatic solutions to hardware and software problems, or interesting techniques for getting a task done. TiVo, being just a shiny PC with a generalized operating system and expandable via all-but off-the-shelf parts, has proven eminently hackable.

Communities of TiVo hackers have sprung up on the Internet, the most well-know being the TiVo Forum (http://www.tivocommunity.com/). In this book, I’ve collected and written up some of the more useful, interesting, and cool hacks I’ve found. There are hardware hacks, requiring you to pop the top off your TiVo and fiddle about with the innards. There are 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.

Don’t worry, I’ll guide you. Many of these hacks stand on their own, but more of them require you to do one of the other hacks first, whether it be to get you inside the box or just to enter a series of codes into a Search by Title field. If there’s a prerequisite, there’ll be a cross-reference to guide you to the appropriate hack. Feel free to flip around, following whatever interests you. I’ll try to keep the map clear of obstacles.

But a couple of fair warnings before we continue. There are two types of hacks, explicitly, that you won’t find in this book. The first are those that circumvent having to pay for TiVo. There are a few open source projects out there, like MythTV (http://mythtv.sourceforge.net), 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. While people have tried—and may of succeeded—to use these same techniques for the TiVo, I’m not going to talk about them. In fact, most TiVo hackers, including those that you find mentioned in this book, are not going to talk about the subject. Bypassing the TiVo, Inc. service to get television programming information into your TiVo without paying the appropriate fees is one of those shunned topics. TiVo, Inc. has built a fabulous combination of hardware, software, and service. They’ve embraced TiVo hacking and coexist peacefully with the hacker community. But they do need to make a living, leaving it up to every TiVo hacker to reciprocate by paying their dues and helping TiVo maintain this openness and hackability.

The second type of hacks you won’t see in this book 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 boxes. There are those who’ve managed to gain access to the internals of the Series 2 TiVo, opening it up to many of the hacks available for the Series 1. Unfortunately, the methods to do so are 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 TiVos appearing online over time.

Caveat Hacker

You’ve not doubt noticed the “Do not open or you will void your warranty” sticker emblazoned across the back of your TiVo box. Well, that is true. If you open your box, you will not be able to send your TiVo into TiVo, Inc. if a problem develops.

If this is of little concern to you, you can stomach the possible consequences, or your TiVo is more than a year old and out of warranty anyway, then open her right up! There is simply no way around it for the lion’s share of hacks in this book. If you’re going to add a new hard drive, add networking to a Series 1 TiVo, or get a command-line prompt going, you are going to need to pull that box apart and put it back together again.

So, how hard is it really? If you are already pretty comfortable poking around inside a PC, then you should have no problem as a lot of those skills apply to what you will need to do. If not, don’t worry, you’re probably a quick study.

On the hardware end, about the only oddity is the need for a Torx-10 screwdriver—available at most fully stocked hardware stores—to unscrew those star-patterned screws and pop off the case. On the software end, the only price of admission is a basic working knowledge of, or willingness to learn, a little about the Unix operating system that is TiVo’s brain.

All that said, let me add a few caveats before you dive in:

TiVo sports a massive power supply that, even when unplugged, could deliver a nasty shock.
The edges of the case are mighty sharp, so mind your head, shoulders, knees, and toes.
Back up your TiVo before and between hacks. We put in substantial time and effort to make sure the directions we give are pretty clear, but that doesn’t mean mistakes can’t happen.
Backing up is for wimps, you say? I can’t emphasize enough how important it is. You do not want to end up with a $400 lemon if something goes wrong. Although you probably could find somebody out there that can give you software to restore your TiVo if something goes wrong, why should you go through all that hassle to find someone to help? Just think of backing up as an insurance policy and take the few minutes to make one of your own when we say so, and save the living on the edge for surfing or rock climbing.
Hacks that you install may or may not be permanent. Your TiVo calls home to the TiVo service once a day and, during that time, TiVo might send an operating system update for the box that has a good chance of undoing whatever hacks you have installed. This is little more than a minor irritation, but just be warned that you might have to reinstall your hacks every once in a while. All that hard work, down the drain.
You may think that one way of preventing this is to stop operating system updates from installing, but you might be missing some rather useful fixes, updates, and new features. When I bought my first TiVo, it did not have a Season Pass Manager until it magically showed up in one of the system updates one morning.

How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1: Explore what the TiVo can do even before you pop the lid. This chapter is devoted to taking a look around the TiVo and discovering what tricks you can get it to do even without rearranging the internal bits.
Chapter 2: Once you become a TiVo addict (and you quickly will), you are quickly going to want more hours on your box. You are going to want to record more television shows, and sometimes save an episode or two for a long period of time. This chapter details upgrading the storage capacity of your box.
Chapter 3: While you have that lid open, why not try enabling a Bash prompt? Command-line access means your TiVo becomes that much more like any other PC in your home. The text interface and blinking cursor dramatically alters what you can twiddle and thus do with your TiVo.
Chapter 4: Your TiVo should be part of your home network. Your desktop computer should be talking to and making requests of your TiVo. Your office computer, a couple of miles down the road, should be doing the same. Bringing the Internet all the way to your TiVo is not as difficult as it sounds. This chapter will show you how and some interesting things to do once you have your TiVo online.
Chapter 5: Two solutions provide access to, and manipulation, of your TiVo over the Web: the official TiVo Home Media Option (HMO) and the open source TiVoWeb project. The former allows for remote programming and manipulation of your TiVo over the Web with all the simplicity you’ve come to expect from TiVo. The latter provides so much more than simple web access to your TiVo; it’s a platform for Web-based TiVo-centric applications, extensible to your heart’s content.
Chapter 6: Regular TiVo users simply record their television shows to VCR tapes when they want to save something. But by this chapter you will no longer be a regular TiVo user, so let’s talk about pulling and pushing video from and to your TiVo, archiving shows in full digital splendor on your home PC or burning them to DVD.
Chapter 7: What if you want to write your own software for the TiVo? Here’s a crash-course in writing programs for TiVo in Tcl and in C—and a few nifty examples along the way.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following is a list of the typographical conventions used in this book:

Italic

Used to indicate new terms, URLs, filenames, file extensions, and directories and to highlight comments in examples. For example, a path in the filesystem will appear as /Developer/Applications.

Constant width

Used to show code examples, the contents of files, commands, or the output from commands.

Constant width bold

Used in examples and tables to show commands or other text that should be typed literally.

Constant width italic

Used in examples and tables to show text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.

[RETURN]

A carriage return ([RETURN]) at the end of a line of code is used to denote an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enter these as two lines of code, but as one continuous line. Multiple lines are used in these cases due to page width constraints.

Menu symbols

When looking at the menus for any application, you will see some symbols associated with keyboard shortcuts for a particular command. For example, to open an old chat in iChat, you would go to the File menu and select Open . . . (File → Open . . . ), or you could issue the keyboard shortcut,

-O. The

symbol corresponds to the

key (also known as the “Command” key), located to the left and right of the spacebar on any Macintosh keyboard.

Pay special attention to notes set apart from the text with the following icons:

Tip

This is a tip, suggestion, or general note. It contains useful supplementary information about the topic at hand.

Warning

This is a warning or note of caution.

The thermometer icons, found next to each hack, indicate the relative complexity of the hack:

beginner

moderate

expert

The TiVo remote control buttons are used as follows:

TiVo button

Play

Advance (jump) button

Pause

Instant Replay button

Slow

Thumbs Up

Rewind

Thumbs Down

Fast Forward

Record

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