i40.com

Just the other night I was joking with Cheryl that I was going to have to re-hack the Tivos again. And she laughed in a nervous politeness that indicated I better be kidding.. I was..

Our Tivos have been working flawlessly since the last time I hacked them, the week we got them. I had one of them cracked opened, and torn apart before the FedEx truck got out of the driveway. As marvelous as the Tivos are, I knew we could get more out of them. DirecTivos (Tivos with DirecTV built into them) have great picture (same stream that comes from the Satellite) and Sound (Dolby Digital Encoding) but lack some features that stand alone Tivos brag about.

• There is no way to Schedule recordings remotely (like when I'm at work, and remember something I want to record).
• There is no way to pull programs off the DirecTivo and save them on DVD for friends, family, and archiving.
• There is no way to pull a program from one Tivo and watch it on another Tivo

All these things are useful and the only way to get them on a DirecTivo is to hack it. So Hack it I did. It was a 2 weeks of research (the Tivo hacking forums are Hostile to anyone who doesn't do due diligence before asking a question, and step by step guides are severely frowned upon since the technology changes so quickly), cussing, Green Screens of Death, more cussing, and eventually celebration.

This morning I finally got another feature working, I successfully took a DVD and inserted the program onto one of the Tivos, which means I now need MORE space on the Tivo to store DVDs so I can put the originals out of the way of our 17 Month Old.

I was also reading, just this week, that the new software version will be forced on me sooner or later, and my life will be simpler if I do the upgrade myself rather than re-hacking the units after the upgrade takes effect (and the
upgrade has some nice features including faster browsing).

So now the research begins again, and I can already hear Cheryl asking "Why can't you just leave this stuff alone!?!?!?!?!?".

For a list of good Tivo Hacking resources see this Wiki Entry.

-Jason