Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement and Development Starter Kit (ExtremeTech) - Softcover

Keegan, Jeff

3.19

36 ratings by Goodreads

9780764543364: Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement and Development Starter Kit (ExtremeTech)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0764543369 ISBN 13: 9780764543364

Publisher: Wiley, 2003

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You love your TiVo. Make it love you back.

In Hacking TiVo, TiVo Underground insider Jeff Keegan blows the lid off of your TiVo, literally. Your TiVo does many wonderful things on its own; Hacking TiVo shows you how to access TiVo enhancements that you've never dreamed of.

The obvious hacks are all there, of course, including:

vastly increasing the size of your TiVo's hard drive
accessing the backdoor remote control codes
full detail on how, when, and why to use over 35 backdoor codes
adding on-screen sports scores, stock tickers and more
starting and stopping installed hacks with your remote control
hacking into the TiVo operating system.

Those hacks, while fun and interesting, just scratch the surface.

Advanced hacks covered in the book will show you how to not only connect your TiVo to the Internet, but also allow you to take control of your TiVo remotely via the Web once that connection exists. Hook your TiVo into online instant messaging services like ICQ or Instant Messenger; link it to your Caller ID; display your own photos onscreen; or insert footage from your camcorder into your TiVo.

At the heart of this book is its unique CD-ROM, which makes hacking your TiVo fast and fun. Simply insert the CD and reboot, and your PC becomes a Linux machine, pre-configured and capable of reading and writing to your TiVo hard drives. Simply follow along with the book to install the hacks one at a time, or use the CD’s “install all” feature to install all of the hacks at once! This is simply the easiest CD-ROM available today for TiVo hackers.

At over 500 pages, Hacking TiVo offers more extensive, hands-on coverage of backdoor codes, video extraction, and operating system hacks than any other TiVo book available. And with more than a hundred pages of guidance on writing your own hacks, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Hacking TiVo is available exclusively from Amazon.com. If you’re looking for the very best book on getting the most out of your TiVo, you’ve come to the right place.

Your TiVo is already great. With Hacking TiVo, take your TiVo to the next level.

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Review:

In Hacking TiVo, Jeff Keegan proves that the TiVo television-recording device is far more than an enhancement to the passive lifestyle. By showing his readers how to use known tricks and all-purpose resourcefulness (plus some online community resources), Keegan shows how to make the TiVo perform far beyond its advertised purpose. He provides a chef's tour of the versatile appliance, calling attention to non-invasive tricks (like entering Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select to skip exactly 30 seconds ahead in a recording to bypass an ad) before moving on to more drastic kinds of fun. By the time you're through with Keegan's guide to the TiVo, you'll have it working as a more or less complete Unix workstation, accessible over the Internet via the excellent TivoWeb interface, and showing home videos, telephone caller ID information, and instant-messaging communications on your television screen.

This book mostly is concerned with software hacks, which will void your TiVo warranty as surely as anything involving a soldering iron, but which have the advantage of usually being reversible. Though he says the hacks in this book will work on TiVo Series1 and Series2, he doesn't explain how to defeat the systems' anti-intrusion mechanisms (which prevent the installation of software, and thus preclude the performance of about half the hacks in this book). This appears to be an exclusion for legal reasons, and he points out that the information is easily found on the Internet. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to make your TiVo do more of what you want. Instructions show how to add a bigger hard drive (for greater recording time), access the TiVo's bash command line, use unsupported command sequences, and share files between your TiVo and your networked personal computer. Particularly neat sections deal with using TivoWeb and putting Caller ID information on-screen.

About the Author:

JEFF KEEGAN — software engineer by day, TiVo hacker by night. A vocal and active member of the TiVo online community, Jeff wrote and released the mail, search, and log modules for the TivoWeb project. He's a frequent contributor to tivocommunity.com, a forum for TiVo enthusiasts.

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