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Hacking The Tivo 132

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-a-fun-way-to-void-your-warranty dept.
K2 dug up a page where people are discussing hacking the Tivo (note to outsiders: Hacking is a good thing!) Essentially, they figured out how to mount the boot partition, and get a shell running off the serial port. It's a long page, and it doesn't start getting really interesting until you're a third of the way into it, but it opens up the door for fun ways of voiding your warranty like adding bigger hard drives... of course my dream is a way to suck MP3s over and use a few gigs of Tivo as a stereo component, but that'd take some doing.
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Hacking the Tivo More

Hacking the Tivo

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  • First we saw i-opener being hacked, now that Tivo is getting hacked. I am not sure if this is a good thing for linux. It gives the industry an example: "Do anything with them Linux, you'd be hacked silly."

    Except the i-opener had nothing to do with linux, save that people who like linux got the i-opener to run it. People also got it to run some variant of BSD, and Windows 98, and so forth... Maybe it was just because the linux advocates were screaming the loudest when Netpliance started forcing people to buy the service when they bought the device...

  • Re:Hacking Cracking (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Hacking" is what people use it to mean: that is, breaking into computers illegally. Sorry, but you can't just redefine words because you don't like what they mean.

    After all, the KKK is simply an organization for "racial pride"! And maybe Slashdot is for "hacking"?
  • Well, that's sort of the consequence of having many developers, redundancy. You could always have someone scrape the fat off. Of course, you could also just have someone say, "Hey, this is the newest shit, use this" in the install files.
  • There already is a HOWTO. It's posted in several places on AVS, and at least once here on /.

    You can find it in this post. [slashdot.org]
  • Ahh, but the Tivo kernel won't support 33.8gb...
  • Cool man.
  • Check out TV Guide [tvguide.com]. From here you can get listing for your cable, satellite, or broadcast TV channels.

    It would be fairly simple to write an interface to this site which can be used with a software-based TIVO/ReplayTV.

    --
  • Tivo doesn't offer upgrades to hard drives. Phillips does. Phillips negotiated with Tivo to make sure that the boxes were not user upgradable. I don't think Tivo really cared one way or another, because their target audience is not as techinically able as most people here.

    Tivo makes money in 2 ways: selling aggregate data (unless you opt out) about what shows are being recorded (but NOT by whom, that data is never linked according to their privacy policy), and somewhat by the monthly service fee (over time, they don't make anything off of the $200 "lifetime" sub).
  • I think Dell/S3's new box would be better suited, but...

    I'm guessing that the built-in MPEG decoder for the TiVo is MPEG2 since that is what DVD's use. (and anything newer would be overkill) MPEG 2 decoders should be able to decode the MPEG 1 - Layer 3 portion which is MP3.

    Refrag
  • the link is probably fine, the hostname isn't resolving.... at least that's what is happening for me.

    ---
  • So okay -- this is not going to be a popular project with The Forces That Be.

    Imagine that you have some kind of automatic cable capture utility, like TiVo, on your computer. Say you can also stream the resulting mpeg (or whatever) data across the net. Great! Who needs satellite TV?

    Unfortunately, this was iCraveTV's business model. And if you think the RIAA is steamed about napster, wait until you see the TV networks get upset. On suing iCraveTV, they actually used the expression get medieval on their ass.
  • But in the context it is being used here, it has the traditional meaning not the "popular" one.
  • Any word how long before Apache will be running on this thing?
  • Well, it has a built in MPEG decoder. Possibly, but I don't know if the decoder can be used. The PowerPC chip itself only runs at maybe 50 Mhz, and is heavily used already.

    The whole reason people are hacking the Tivo is that they want to be able to add their own drives. That's it. They use a special file system, and we've been working that out for a while now.

    ---
  • Sir, that note was for you!!
  • I've been working for a Fortune 100 company in the information technology department for over a three months. My responsibilities mainly include HVAC duties, as well as focused-point suction of dust particles. In any case, our systems are all Windows-based. They work okay, but as I've been telling the CTO and CEO (I have contact with both of them because I also perform focused-point suction of their offices), Linux is much better. The problem, however, is that there is too much of a "hacker" image of the Linux community. They're worried that if we switch, the hackers will get in. To try to assuage their worries, I loaded up a copy of Linux 7 on their machines. The only problem was that it overwrote what they already have, so they were a bit mad. Because of that, I don't think they were able to appreciate the full power. I did make a big point of telling them that certain experts could install graphical Linuxes, the one I installed could only have a command prompt. I just hope that you all stop talking about hacking so that we and other big Fortune 100 companies can load Linux 7 on our networks.

  • Things I'd like to see done to the TIVO (Score:5)

    by smartin ( 942 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:12AM (#984161)
    The main thing i'd like to see done with the TIVO is to add an ethernet card to the thing to make it a node on my home network. This would allow the following sorts of things:
    • Get it to use my main internet connection to access the program info.
    • Allow other machines on the home network to configure it and talk to it through a Web interface.
    • Allow other machines to mount it's file system and access saved content for the purpose of either viewing it or archiving it.
    • Provide WebTV like internet access from the tv.
    • Provide local home network functionality and accesss from the TV.


    Does anyone know if TIVO has any of the above in the works?
  • [i]tivo uses big-endian ext2? if so, i believe fsck still has the meta-data byte swap option. doesn't bswap swap every byte on the partition?[/i]

    You're correct. My bad. Going through and actually swapping it on the disk would be bad.

    Yes, it still uses big-endian ext2. The kernel is 2.1.14, I believe, with the Tivo mods to make it a more real-time system.

    Also, remember it's PPC and I don't think they removed big endian support until 2.1.21, right?

    ---
  • hmm. maybe not a house, but wouldn't a car engine make a nice computer case?

    Seriously, I agree. Also, I found your comment funny and refreshing, however, no mod access today.
  • Probably because some other joker already cut/paste this message in. Sure this one may be by one of the guys that actually did it, but this is Slashdot where first posting gets all the credit. :)
  • Posted by 11223:

    Question - how does the Tivo display its graphics to the screen - is it X windows, or is it a /dev/fb0 program, or is it SVGAlib? Is it possible to hack this thing to serve as a remote X display, or (better yet) to run Quake?
  • though there are some issues, you have options:
    1. Replay doesn't require you to subscribe (they just charge $200 more up front... hmm, sounds like tivo's lifetime service). So buy Replay if that ploy dupes you, or buy the lifetime+ tivo for the price of a Replay.
    2. You can forego the service altogether and treat the Tivo like a digital vcr. If you think this is the way to go, you're wasting your money on a tivo; just get a tv capture card for your PC. The service makes it possible to foget when things come on, and let tivo adjust to the network's schedules.

    The ethernet option is not likely with the current hardware; no standard slots available. Besides, why bother with a tivo if all you want is a digital vcr? The Tivo is much cooler than that, and worth either the lifetime service (lifetime of machine, btw), or the $10/month. I've had one for 4 months and can't imagine dealing with live tv again.

  • New acronym! (Score:4)

    by MostlyHarmless ( 75501 ) <(gro.llehseerf) (ta) (tnedtra)> on Thursday June 22, 2000 @03:43AM (#984167)
    According to the TV industry, TIVO Is Violence and Oppression.
    nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
  • Damn straight...

    Crackers are the guys that cracked all the games for the C64 back in the day! (and the games/applications for all other platforms)

    Crackers are not bad-guy-hackers.

    Refrag
  • Its all because cc's the man. The big bad tivo hacker himself.

  • Your Linux box offering the same services. (Score:4)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @03:45AM (#984170)
    I have been pondering the possibility of using my computer for the same services. Perhaps a software package that has the functions of tivo is in order?
  • Given that the thing runs a 54mhz CPU (as reported in my logfiles), and that said CPU is already pretty much pushed to the max, I don't think Apache is the best idea.

    I do think that browser control of the TiVo would be cool, but you'd want to use a lighter weight web server, or ideally, something custom written for the job.
  • Interesting, but does the TiVo have the processing power to play MP3s?
  • Check out http://www.tivo.com/linux/. It has their mods to the kernel and some tools they created. Since they aren't really losing money on the hardware I don't think they care if you hack it.
  • Nahhhhh. MP3 decoders these days are pretty lean, i'm sure it could handle it. If my old Amiga could do it on a 25Mhz 68040, i'm sure the TiVo can :)
  • Hey, the MPAA may sue you.

    They won't like a Linux box able to record shows. So, what if the Tivo runs linux, they don't care about facts, they just want to scare people into kissing their asses!

  • Re:No, hacking is not a good thing (Score:4)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:15AM (#984176) Homepage Journal

    Most of the replies to this are of the form, "Oh, you're thinking of cracking, and yeah, that's a bad thing. We're talking about hacking, and that's a good thing."

    The poster has a good point: the distinction between 'good hack' and 'bad hack' is lost on the crowd, especially in the world of suits. None of the mainstream dictionaries describe this difference, or define 'cracking' in a computer context.

    I think reverse-engineering and adaptation of things is very cool, and the inventor/tinkerer ethic is quite well-received in the world as a whole. However, that's not what 90% of the public thinks about when they hear the word 'hacker'.

    Reality is perception. If 90% of the people don't see a distinction, then for all intents and purposes, there is no distinction. Even if the remaining 10% scream, whine, bitch, complain and sneer whenever the word is used.

  • That was either a bad Troll, or a good piss take. ;)
  • I was thinking more along the lines of just using xawtv for vidcap and playback, and perhaps some mods that allow for pausing, commercial elimination, stuff like that.
  • This is a very good idea, what programs would be required for recording video input, and outputting it to your TV? The TiVO service would still be great for getting the program information, but we could write it much better, for instance to not record reruns.

  • sell these to Blockbuster (Score:4)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:17AM (#984180) Homepage Journal
    When I worked at blockbuster, they played a tape over and over and over again each month with movie previews, music videos, etc. Needless to say the tape and VCR gets worn out.

    They should just get a TiVo for each blockbuster with an Ethernet port(no, wait, then it'd need DSL. how about a CD-ROM?) and then each Blockbuster could download the preview loop(maybe even have it go longer than 2 hours so employees wont go out of their minds from the reptition) and play it on the monitors all day.

    Oh yeah, I smell an IPO here.
  • I'd say the best part of this is the how-to guide to getting a second HD in the unit. Something like 30GB of disk on the Tivo. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum 6/HTML/004437.html [avsforum.com]

  • Why people are doing it: (Score:5)

    by Otto ( 17870 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:19AM (#984182) Homepage Journal
    I've been a regular over on that board for a while (nick: Otto) and there's really only one reason people are hacking it, right now. To add new drives. New drives = more space to record programs. They use a weird filesystem called Media FS for storing the recorded programs, and to add a new drive you have to do some strange things with the Tivo software. You can plug in anything, but the Tivo software won't recognize it unless you follow a certain procedure. Since Tivo won't tell us, we're just figuring it out. There have been 2 reports of someone doing a self upgrade on the space. One guy copied the second drive from a fresh, unused Tivo, the other guy says he figured out how to "bless" a drive so the Tivo software recognizes it.

    Anyway, we've been working on this for a while, and the possibilities are staggering. The Tivo is essentially a PowerPC 50 Mhz or so, with a built in modem/ IDE interface card. Also on board are an MPEG encoder and decoder chips and a TV tuner. Very neat. The serial port is actually used to directly connect to DSS receivers, to change channels reliably.

    To connect a shell to the serial port: take out the drive, mount it under linux (use bswap to do byte swapping). To mount it under linux, you probably have to recompile your kernel using the genhd.c from the tivo linux sources. Anyway, once you mount it you'll find several things on several partitions. You can then edit the startup rc.d's to put a shell on /dev/ttyS3 and then you can use a null modem cable to connect to that shell while it's back in the Tivo unit. Pretty neat.

    There's a lot of cool swag going on here, but it'll be a while before good mods come out. The only thing I worry about is that some wanker will hack the thing to get around Tivo's service.

    Making it not use Tivo's service at all would be extremely difficult. Making it use Tivo service wrongly, by giving the wrong serial or some such, would be easier, but they could crack down on the modified Tivo's and not let people with mods dialin anymore. That would suck. Plus, since Tivo updates the software from time to time, an update to a modded box could ruin the sucker.

    Just some of my thoughts, and insights.

    ---
  • And, to act as your cable-modem gateway and be usable as an mp3 player.

    Add a dvd drive.

    Viola! The all-in-one unit everyone would have a use for.
  • have they called you with a job offer yet?

    If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
  • Wrong! cc's was at 6:29p and MrKai's higher rated redundant posting was a full two hours later at 8:34p. Just not fair.

    If I had some Karma to give...

  • It's all hearsay, but I was told that it uses a Macromedia product with the videocard's framebuffer, not X
  • ph34r da l33t j4n1t0r!!!

    --

  • Yes, it is. (Score:3)

    by Outland Traveller ( 12138 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:22AM (#984188)

    I think you're wrong on this.. Hackers are defined in the Jargon file (also well known amoungst the more tech-savvy) as the following:

    hacker n.

    [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker.

    "Hacking" the TIVO would appear to fit 1,3,and 7 at least. One other thing to keep in mind is the collosally important tradition of reverse-engineering that is at the heart and soul of all curious, intelligent people who don't care to (or can't afford to) accept without scrutiny an object/news story/law that is packaged up by some other group of people with their own motivations.

    I'm getting a little carried away, but I think that being able to dissect something to see how it works is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy, which is why laws like the DCMA are so dangerous. Certain companies and certain governments would love it if their citizens were unable to make informed decisions. Careful analysis, whether it is on hardware,software,media,etc. is a basic check against manipulation.

    So, whether people are hacking the TIVO for an intellectual challenge, to see if they can make more effective use of their money, or to reassure themselves that the device isn't doing anything more than they expect, the act itself is an excercise in analysis that should always be considered "a good thing".

    Simply because some choose to do evil things with information does not make the pursuit of information evil. -OT

  • Linux will NEVER

    Don't you mean "GNU/Linux"? After all, if you're going to be a pedantic prick, why be a pedantic prick about only one thing?

  • Yeah, I think we will see something come down the road soon. You can almost cobble one together now, a video capture card (ATI all in wonder or something), IBM 75 gig drive, and an X10 DVD anywhere setup. With that hardware you should be able to accomplish the same thing that the TIVO is doing, all you need now is for someone to set up some service on the web that can pull channel information for your location's broadcast/cable/satellite/... services.

    You don't really need the X10 stuff, though I don't really want my computer sitting next to my TV in the living room.

    Anyways, the pieces are there, someone just needs to write the software.
  • A good piss take I think. The poster is normally a lot more coherent.
  • Dude,

    TiVO was a good Linux company and offers the kernel source, and application sources online. You can do what you like with them(except sell them). Of course, they are hardware dependant, but if you can alter it to work with say, GATOS, or Video4Linux, you're all set! Don't call Tivo an oppressive company, they've got a good product and even have a web page dedicated to the source code.

  • Here's the text of our announcement.. (Score:4)

    by Dave Muench ( 21979 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:29AM (#984193)
    Here's the text of our announcement in case AVS Forum gets slashdotted. BTW, I'm cc. :)

    Here's how to add a B drive to your TiVo by "blessing" it. This is
    approximately how we did it. We've only done it a few times so far. We will
    be refining the process. We simply wanted to get the initial information out
    quickly.

    This has only been verified to work on a few units so far. A HDR112 has been
    upgraded to 52 hours with a 30 gig Quantum, another HDR112 has been upgraded
    to 40 hours with a 20 gig Quantum, and a Sony 30 hour unit has been upgraded
    as well with a Maxtor B drive, although the newer Sony/Phillips units have a
    drive locking mechanism that makes it very hard to mount their A drives in a
    non-TiVo Linux box.

    WARNING: This modification is not "easy". You take all responsibility for
    modifying your TiVo in this way. It does involve opening the case and
    breaking the warranty sticker. Do not call TiVo support if you make a
    mistake and break your TiVo. If you break it, you own both pieces. If you
    mess up, don't expect us to fix it for you either. Maybe some day someone
    will release a utility that will just bless a drive in 1 easy command on
    your PC, but at this point, it's pretty tricky. It requires that you have
    various technical knowledge about Linux and other software tools. You could
    easily render your TiVo inoperable and possibly unrecoverable.

    WARNING 2: There hasn't been a lot of testing so far on this procedure of
    course. Mine seems to be working perfectly at 52 hours, but you must accept
    the risk that something bad may happen down the road. We suggest that you
    back up your original A drive in some fashion in case you make a mistake.
    How to do that we leave up to you.

    PDISK DISCLAIMER: We had to modify the source code to pdisk. Use it at your
    own risk. There may be bugs. We're not responsible for any loss of data.

    And PLEASE - be careful when you open the unit. It's power supply is
    unshielded. Stay away from it.

    In short - if you don't _understand_ what is going on below, don't do it.
    Just being able to read a list of steps may not be enough at this point.

    When I refer to hard drive partitions on the Linux box, I'll use hdX where X
    is whatever letter is appropriate for that drive.

    I used a Quantum lct10 30 gig drive (part number QML30000LB-A) that I bought
    from www.onsale.com. My off the shelf Quantum seems to have the Quickview
    and TiVo extensions in it, perhaps they all do. It is the same drive used in
    HDR31202's and presumably the newer Sonys. Any drive may work as a B drive,
    but I've only tried my Quantum. Also be aware - the version of Linux on the
    TiVo doesn't seem to support drives larger than 33.8 gig. I don't know if
    TiVo patched their older kernel to support them. Set the B drive's jumper to
    slave.

    You need to be able to access the original A drive and new B drive from
    another Linux box. To do this on an x86 box, you need to integrate TiVo's
    modifications to the Mac partition code. There are some patches on
    ftp://ftp.curry.org/pub/tivo, ftp://ftp.rotorway.org/incoming/tivo, and
    http://www.wasteland.org/tivo. Please, if anyone can mirror these few files
    it would be very helpful. If we get hit too hard, we'll have to take the
    files down. You also need to be able to turn on byte swapping for those 2
    drives (hdX=bswap). I had the most luck with Linux 2.4.0-test1. You also
    need to enable the Mac partitioning in the kernel.

    If that all works, you'll see the TiVo's partitions on the A drive hooked to
    your Linux box. There should be 11 of them. Mount partition 4 (hdX4)
    somewhere, it's an ext2 filesystem. Edit the bottom of etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
    so it starts a bash shell on /dev/ttyS3. Also you need to blank out the
    first few sectors on the new B drive, with this command: "dd if=/dev/zero
    of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=32".

    Get the hard drives back in the TiVo (both of em) and hook up the DSS serial
    cable to your computer. You'll need a null modem adapter and gender changer
    at the minimum. The terminal settings are 9600,8N1. You should get a bash
    prompt shortly after the "please wait a few more seconds" screen. Run this
    command: "/sbin/bootpage -D /dev/hdb". Then shut down your TiVo and hook the
    B drive back up to the Linux box.

    Now you need a modified version of pdisk which is available on the sites
    I mentioned above. Compile it if necessary (it's in RCS format). With the
    B drive in the Linux box, run "pdisk /dev/hdX" and type in these commands:

    i
    w
    y
    q

    Then run: "pdisk -d /dev/hdX" and type these commands:

    C 2p 4M "Second MFS application region" MFS
    C 3p 3p "Second MFS media region" MFS
    x
    m
    3
    x
    w
    y
    q

    That will create the new partitions. Shut down the Linux box now and mount
    the B drive in the TiVo permanently. Turn the TiVo back on and get into the
    bash shell on it again.

    You need to mount the diagnostics partition next. Type this on your TiVo:
    "mount -t ext2 -o ro /dev/hda7 /mnt". Then run this to add the magic bit
    sequence to your new B drive: "/mnt/diag/genAddDiskTiVoID /dev/hdb3". Type
    "umount /mnt" to unmount that diagnostics partition, and reboot your TiVo.
    That should do it. Check the system information and see if your capacity
    increased. If not, you can try this one last thing that I don't believe is
    necessary, but it might be: mount the diagnostics partition again, and run
    "/mnt/diag/setkeys -globalkeys /dev/hdb".

    That's it. If you want to now, you can edit the rc.sysinit to stop the bash
    shell from starting (or if you were smart, you made a backup copy when you
    started and can just copy the backup over the modified one).

    Credit for figuring out this procedure goes to cc, Peter Creath, TivoTechie,
    and Ron Curry.

    6/21/00
  • Well if your going to buffer the files and write some wicked code, why not just pull out the old soldering iron and start attaching some S3 chips.
  • If it helps them sell more I-Openers and Tivos, do they care that it gets hacked?

    --

  • Hey guys,

    I am Richard Bullwinkle, the Chief Evangelist for TiVo. (You may know me as TiVolutionary.)

    TiVo has no official comment on the recent "hacking" of TiVo. We do not know how our hardware partners will want to react to it.

    However, we did want to clarify a few things with regard to this subject.

    First, we want to remind you that opening your TiVo does void your warrantee, and that anything you modify that makes your TiVo unable to connect or use the TiVo service is at your own risk. If your TiVo fails to work with our current, or any future version of the TiVo service because of hacking we would not be able to help you get it working again, or take any financial responsibility for doing so.

    Also, because the Slashdot community is so large, you have flooded the AVSForum, where TiVo users discuss TiVo, thus making it unusable. See for yourself.

    We don't want to come off as Big Brother in any way, but please mirror the information in that thread here, because the moderator for AVS must delete the thread to allow his forum to come back to a normal load.

    Finally, I want to clear up something that has come up often, and I had to speak with our engineers to find out the details.

    Many of you have asked why we haven't released the code for our file system MFS, as it might be covered by GPL. In fact, it isn't. Many of you have speculated that MFS stands for Mac File System, where in this case it is a completely proprietary system called Media File System. Here are some statements from Dave Platt, our Senior Engineer, who many of you know of:

    - MFS stands for "Media File System", not "Macintosh File System".

    - MFS is a completely new design and implementation, done by TiVo.
    It was not based upon, and does not incorporate any GPL'ed code
    from the Linux kernel or any other source.

    - It isn't even really a "filesystem" in the usual Linux sense
    of that phrase. None of the code having to do with the MFS
    data organization is part of the kernel - it's all implemented
    as a user-mode library. MFS has an application API which is
    very different from a traditional Linux (or Posix) I/O
    interface. It would be a difficult, frustrating, and nasty
    job to implement a standard POSIX API on top of MFS (trust me,
    I tried, and gave it up as a bad job).

    - MFS does take advantage of a "direct access to raw disk partition,
    bypassing the Linux buffer cache" API which we added to the Linux
    kernel and syscall interface. We implemented this API because
    the Linux kernel we used didn't have one. We've published the full
    source code for this enhanced kernel on our Web site, and it's
    available for anyone to use or adapt under the terms of the GPL.

    Please feel free to write me should you have any questions or concerns! TiVo remains dedicated to cooperating with and supporting the Linux community.

    Cheers,
    Richard Bullwinkle
    TiVolutionary
    tivolutionary@tivo.com
  • FYI: TiVo has 66mhz PowerPC processor, which is barley enough to run it's UI/DB. Without a serious 3D graphics card to do the work, I highly doubt you could get Quake to run at any useable frame rate.
  • Why not just use DVD? No wear, no tear, no IPO ;p
  • There's no need to prove that Linux can do the same thing as TiVO. It's already Linux-based.
  • I have a BT848 capture card. I use the BTTV drivers. xawtv can capture (and with mods it can descrable). There are video cards with TV out, but it seems to be smartest to encode to mpeg for storage, so encode to mpeg, and then modify the DVD hacks that use a creative DVD card to playback your recordintgs to TV. Boom, you're done :-)
  • Even if your Linux box could record the shows, you would still need the programming service to let your computer know what was on. I don't see Tivo offering just the service without the hardware. I believe that they do make a profit off of the hardware, and more importantly, it's much easier to support a standard console then some geek's home brew box running a dev kernel. As more people move computers into the living room, there may be a market for a software/service package in the near future, but it probably won't be from Tivo. There are far worse business plans already running out there. *cought*NetZero*cought*
    -B

    If someone reads this post, starts a company, and makes a million bucks, you have to buy me a case of beer.

  • Echelon was that fantastic space flight simulator for the Commodore 64. It even came with a microphone headset so you could talk to fire your weapons. How could anyone forget that game?
  • There have been 2 reports of someone doing a self upgrade on the space. One guy copied the second drive from a fresh, unused Tivo, the other guy says he figured out how to "bless" a drive so the Tivo software recognizes it.

    So far, there have been three units upgraded using the "blessing" procedure. My unit is the 40 hour mentioned in the blessing instructions.

    While the upgrade seems to work perfectly, people should keep in mind that these upgraded units have only been in service for a day or two now. Not long enough to really tell if there will be negative effects.
  • A man after my own heart! Never pay for information you can suck off the web for free with a perl script.

    -Joe
  • The forces of darkness (MPAA members and the TV/Cable networks) do not want you to have control over the box. They want to collect fees for the use of their content, add copy protection and playback restrictions, insert commercials at the box, and disable any features that they think are bad for their business. They have made substantial investments in the companies that produce these systems. Do you want to skip over a commercial? Sorry, Time-Warner has decided to disable that feature. Wouldn't you rather watch a trailer for Sony's latest motion picture?
  • If I hack my own box and find a buffer overflow for say apache, and write an exploit, what is that considered? Was I an asshole and cracked my own box or was I a thoughtful hacker? What if I did that to someone elses box and then contacted them saying "blah blah fix apache heres what I did..."

    Cracker sounds like a term for a white person, I will continue to use the word hacker forever. All this hacker/cracker bullshit has sprung up in the last 5 years or so. Go back in 93 or 94 and ask what is a cracker. They will reply "someone who writes those patches so shareware programs run past their expiration date."
  • If the device (like the i-Opener) is a loss leader for their service, yes, they care.

  • Cool! I hacked my Tevos! (Score:3)

    by Karmageddon ( 186836 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @04:51AM (#984210)
    I hacked my Tevos. I stapled leather all over the upside, and now I have shoes for the price of sandals! And it's so cool, because if I want to watch a scene in a movie again, I just slip them on, walk over to the VCR, hit rewind, and voila! time shifting!
  • Awesome point. Simply awesome.

    Brings me back to the whole Y2K thing really. Just because a couple of anal-retenives say that this isn't really the Millennium, it means nothing. Most of the media and public said it was, as the number 2000 was more significant. Hell, even PRINCE figured that out (1999).

    Thus, all the hard-core geeks missed were some righteous parties. Whoops.

    Reality IS perception. I like that. New mantra for me ...

  • Even if your Linux box could record the shows, you would still need the programming service to let your computer know what was on. I don't see Tivo offering just the service without the hardware. I believe that they do make a profit off of the hardware, and more importantly, it's much easier to support a standard console then some geek's home brew box running a dev kernel.

    TiVo the company provides the services and software to run the TiVo boxes, but they do not build the hardware. They parnter with existing manufacturers to provide the hardware, currently Phillips and Sony and soon AOL, and they in fact subsidize the hardware manufacturing by paying their partners for each TiVo box built. (I own a little TiVo stock if you're wondering how I know this.) So based on their current business model it would seem that they would want to encourage homebrew machines (although your point about supporting systems where they don't have absolute control over the software is something they would need to deal with).

  • The main thing i'd like to see done with the TIVO is to add an ethernet card to the thing to make it a node on my home network.... Does anyone know if TIVO has any of the above in the works?

    I have been told that they are considering the edition of ethernet support. Please contact them [tivo.com] and let them know you are interested in this. I really want this feature too so we need let them know how many of us there are. I plan on upgrading my current 14 hour machine (which I love) whenever they add ethernet support, HDTV support, or support for user expandable storage.

  • I'll use words as I want to use the way I want to sue them

    Apparently so.

  • To connect a shell to the serial port: take out the drive, mount it under linux (use bswap to do byte swapping). To mount it under linux, you probably have to recompile your kernel using the genhd.c from the tivo linux sources. Anyway, once you mount it you'll find several things on several partitions. You can then edit the startup rc.d's to put a shell on /dev/ttyS3 and then you can use a null modem cable to connect to that shell while it's back in the Tivo unit. Pretty neat.

    tivo uses big-endian ext2? if so, i believe fsck still has the meta-data byte swap option. doesn't bswap swap every byte on the partition?

  • Thanks, I was looking for such information.

    Another good url is: ccdecoder [linux.com] which is my decoder for information stored in the vertical blanking interval of a standard cable system -- use this and you can pull channel info, program info and webtv urls (assuming you have a bttv tuner card in your computer capable of capturing the vbi). Also, check out FAME [enst-bretagne.fr] which an mpeg2 encoder (needs work though).

    I'll be very interested in helping out any project to create a free tivo clone.
    - MbM

  • I've got a Pentium 100-based MP3 jukebox that can run MP3Blaster at ~20-25% CPU. If I want to make sure it doesn't get bored, I can have LAME start encoding new MP3s to suck up the remaining CPU and the playback continues uninterrupted.

    I doubt that a P90 would have any problems with playback. (Unless you try making the poor thing run X.)

  • Oh yeah, what a reputable source of information. Everyone knows what the jargon file and its writers would consider hacking. Or at least everyone here does. But that's not of interest. If there was a dispute over the word "love," and I quoted a Nazi dictionary where the definition of the word was "the spirit to eliminate inferior people," would that do much to change your mind? Obviously, (and I shouldn't even have to point this out, but with some of the closed-mindedness around here I feel I have to) I'm not trying to draw any parallels between Nazis and the writers of the Jargon file, but the point stands that quoting someone with a vested interest and citing it as "proof" is complete b.s. .. In any case, try this from Webster's:

    hack (hk)
    v. hacked, hacking, hacks
    v. tr.

    • Informal. To alter (a computer program): hacked her text editor to read HTML.
    • To gain access to (a computer file or network) illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm's personnel database.

    Now obviously, in common language the word can have two meanings. What the "true" definition of the word is depends on the person using it and the person who's receiving it. There's no such thing as an absolute definition.

  • The primary Quantum drive that comes with the unit has a built-in serial number which the TiVo service validates against. The PRIMARY drive cannot be changed, ghosted, etc. since the serial number is validated everytime the unit 'phones home'.

    The way I understand it, the secondary drive is not auto-recognized unless the primary drive (operating system drive) knows to look for the second drive.

    Now note, that the secondary drive is also supposed to have a serial number which matches against the first drive. TiVo currently doesn't look at the serial # on the second drive... if the start doing that, you'll lose your 2nd drive.

    -Al

  • I just bought a Tivo last night. Has anyone successfully added another big drive in thier Tivo?

    Yes, you can add a second drive. The kernel they used has the 33.8 gig limit, so you can't go larger than that yet. It's not yet clear if we're going to be able to get an upgraded kernel in place without active assistance/participation from TiVo. (It's not just a matter of compiling a kernel and dropping it in place. There are other issues we're uncovering.)
  • > Oh yeah, I smell an IPO here. smell no further. many companies make streaming media servers, among them kasenna:

    http://www.kasenna.com [kasenna.com]

  • I've read a couple comments now about how someone wants to add this new component or that new drive to the Tivo, but really, how difficult would it be to simply build a new computer with a video capture card, an IR remote control, a nice A3D digital (or optical) output soundcard (like the Aureal Vortex), a huge IDE harddrive, a network card and a 3D card? All of a sudden, you've got yourself a Linux entertainment center...

    I mean, come on. For $600 retail, you could easily do what Tivo does on your own. OK. Maybe not that easily, there's the matter of the controlling software and making it as user-friendly as the TIVO's UI presentation. You could still manage the functionality with a little brain-power and a few work-arounds. Plus, you could play your favorite games as well! ;-)

  • Has anyone ever heard of Audio ReQuest? (http://www.request.com) I heard of it from mp3.com's web site. ReQuest is basically an mp3 player for your home Audio-Video system.

    Why hack your TiVo when you can buy a 17gb networkable mp3 player that connects to your TV?

    Then again, why buy a 800$ ReQuest when you can simply hack your TiVo?

    Heck! The solution might be to shell out the cash to buy both a TiVo and a ReQuest, and then proceed to turn one into the other just for the heck of it. :-)

    K.
  • There have been several attempts to hack and upgrade the Tivo with varying degrees of success. Several people have upgraded their 14 hour version to the 30 hour

    The previous upgrades required you to have a 30 hour unit available to clone drives from. As of a couple days ago, it is now possible to add a second drive with access to only one TiVo, using tools available on the TiVo, and a linux box with a patched kernel and a modified version of pdisk.

    My 14 hour TiVo now has 40 hours capacity (ok, 39h 55m if you want to be picky). Next, I'm going to get a 30 hour unit, which should be upgradeable to somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 hours.
  • You should write a HOWTO. There is a ton of good info on avsforum but it's so spread out and pieced together that it's hard for most to follow. A good HOWTO would be great.
  • What would be nice is to add software that converts the MPEG-2 files to MPEG-4 (DivX). That way you could store at least twice as much. You could also add the feature to Archive shows, which would do the conversion.
  • "Hacking" is what people use it to mean: that is, breaking into computers illegally. Sorry, but you can't just redefine words because you don't like what they mean.

    Actually you can. Language isn't defined by dictionaries, it's defined by usage. Think of any number of slang words and what they mean and what the dictionary means. A good example: Venture into your local hood and ask some young male where they're from. Do the same thing in a corporate enviornment. Notice the difference in response's.

    The problem is when those two contexts mix, and when the two are ignorant of each other. Bob the gangbanger will likely recognize where you're coming from, but would you recognize the veiled threat from said gangbanger?

    We know where the writer is coming from, but the writer knows nothing about computer culture. So a writer will perpetuate the hacker==cracker misconception.

    What can we do about it? Eventually language will correct itself, enough people will use the word in certain way, and it will become common. If it's really important to you then use it correctly with explanations and mold the language to your taste's.

  • If you read far enough into the discussion, you'll see that there is some question as to whether they released ALL the code they're required to under the GPL. And given the amount of tamper-proofing they seem to have done (again, based on reading the forum over there), they DO care, and do not want hacking going on.

    The users there are trying (mostly) to figure out how to allow a user to add their own, larger hard drives without paying TIVO's premium price. TIVO would then NOT be making money, hence the contention.
  • cool. actually you are the one that got me started on this =P
    we exchanged a few emails about a month ago, I meant to mention your code as well, but forgot the name of it :(
  • The one and only reason I haven't looked into getting a Tivo yet is the mandatory subscription you have to pay for along with the price of the Tivo itself. If there was a way to remove this from the unit, or better yet, put in an ethernet card and have it "subscribe" to a server on your network so that you can feed it your own information, I would buy one of these in a heartbeat.
  • Are these things legal, so to speak, i mean are you allowed to record stuff from the TV Networks (i am talking technically, not rights &tc, just plain and simple law). :-).

    Yes. The betamax case way back when pretty much settled the whole question of recording shows and time-shifting content.

    However, copyright still lies with the network. You, in theory, can't record a show off TV then copy it for a friend. At least, not while making cash off it.

    Of course there's a difference between what the law says and what the networks do for enforcement. Their main concern is that you don't rip their content without showing the commercials too. That really irks them.

    ---
  • The primary Quantum drive that comes with the unit has a built-in serial number which the TiVo service validates against. The PRIMARY drive cannot be changed, ghosted, etc. since the serial number is validated everytime the unit 'phones home'.

    Mostly true. To clarify: When a brand new unit is set up for the first time, the serial number is read from the primary hard drive and stored in a prom on the motherboard. From then on, the unit uses the serial # from prom to authenticate to the service. Once the initial setup is done, you can replace the primary drive with another brand and still have a functional unit.

    the secondary drive is not auto-recognized unless the primary drive (operating system drive) knows to look for the second drive.

    That's close. It not only has to notice the second drive, but the second drive must be set up in a precise way that will trigger their scripts to prepare it for use. A drive prepared in such a way has come to be called a "blessed drive" in the TiVo discussion forums. The point of the topic is that a group of folks outside of TiVo have now figured out how to "bless" a drive.

    Now note, that the secondary drive is also supposed to have a serial number which matches against the first drive. TiVo currently doesn't look at the serial # on the second drive... if the start doing that, you'll lose your 2nd drive.

    Again, close. If they start validating serial #'s from both drives, you'll lose your whole unit, not just the additional space. Unless, of course, you have complete image backups on hand of partitions 10 and 11 from the original drive, which is a rather large chunk of data to keep on hand. At present, there is no way to back out of the upgrade aside from raw image backups of the original drive.

  • hacking right to pieces (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tivo and Divx sat together in the cold damp cell, clutching each other for safety. "he's always getting me into these fscking messes" Tivo thought, "well, no longer". He slid his legs through the hay covering the ground, looking for any sort of blunt object. It's time he took care of that Divx problem.

    It all started three months ago when Divx had suggested that they drive through the wilds of Canada. Tivo had never been to Canada, having spent his whole life in the deserts of Arizona, so it seemed like an exciting and interesting trip. And he really needed to get out for a while. The same scenery kinda blurs after a while, and every once in a while a vacation is all but necessary. Despite some of the trouble he had with Divx in the past (including a particularly frightening incident where Divx didn't pay for his $3 crack and they were roughed up by the moderafia), Tivo thought that the trip was just what he needed. He shuddered at the aliteration in the last sentance. Some things no man should ever have to witness.

    It seemed okay at first. They made it into Vancouver without a problem, and spent a few days throwing rocks at Illiad's house. That was fun and they were having a great time. However, Divx proved he couldn't be trusted, and he mentioned his .mp3 collection to the wrong people. Hell hath no fury like the Canadian Music Industry.

    Soon our intreped heros found themselves locked in the fifth dungeon beneath Nettwork Records' offices. A week of torture had they endured already, with nothing but the prospect of more. Tivo couldn't take it. He knew if he killed Divx, then they would all but HAVE to let him go. They told him. It was Divx they wanted, not him. He finally found a rock, and surruptiously slid it into his greedy hand. One crack on the base of the skull is all it would take . . .

    Suddenly, the door burst open, and five executives stood there, all holding axes. "so, Mr. Divx, are you ready to surrender the .mp3s yet?"

    "you'll have to pry them off my cold dead corpse!" Divx screamed defiantly.

    "Oh, believe me," the executive went on "we will. But first, your friend"

    They pulled Tivo into the center of the room and held their axes aloft. Tivo screamed to god and his mother, but nothing could stop the rain of cold steel blades as they hacked his thrashing body into a pile of spare parts, continuing long after he had expired.

    Goddamn canadians.
  • finding out what is on is not much of a problem if you have an internet connection, you can use this if you are in the states ftp://foobar.resnet.gatech.edu/pub/ [gatech.edu], this if you are in Germany http://yasd.dhs.org/en [dhs.org]
    and I just wrote one for if you live in Canada, (no web page yet). I think I will either merge mine with the German one, or roll my own UI. I would like it to be similar to the Guide Plus feature of some RCA TVs. This weekend I will have some time to get some code down for the UI, trying to decide whether or not to use GTK or tcl/tk..

  • They figured out how to mod it...read (Score:4)

    by MrKai ( 5131 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @06:34AM (#984243)
    These are the step by step instructions:
    I got them from:http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/00320 0-5.html
    -K

    Here's the post from: http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/004437.htm l

    Here's how to add a B drive to your TiVo by "blessing" it. This is approximately how we did it. We've only done it a few times so far. We will be refining the process. We simply wanted to get the initial information out quickly.

    This has only been verified to work on a few units so far. A HDR112 has been upgraded to 52 hours with a 30 gig Quantum, another HDR112 has been upgraded to 40 hours with a 20 gig Quantum, and a Sony 30 hour unit has been upgraded as well with a Maxtor B drive, although the newer Sony/Phillips units have a drive locking mechanism that makes it very hard to mount their A drives in a non-TiVo Linux box.

    WARNING: This modification is not "easy". You take all responsibility for modifying your TiVo in this way. It does involve opening the case and breaking the warranty sticker. Do not call TiVo support if you make a mistake and break your TiVo. If you break it, you own both pieces. If you mess up, don't expect us to fix it for you either. Maybe some day someone will release a utility that will just bless a drive in 1 easy command on your PC, but at this point, it's pretty tricky. It requires that you have various technical knowledge about Linux and other software tools. You could easily render your TiVo inoperable and possibly unrecoverable.

    WARNING 2: There hasn't been a lot of testing so far on this procedure of course. Mine seems to be working perfectly at 52 hours, but you must accept the risk that something bad may happen down the road. We suggest that you back up your original A drive in some fashion in case you make a mistake. How to do that we leave up to you.

    PDISK DISCLAIMER: We had to modify the source code to pdisk. Use it at your own risk. There may be bugs. We're not responsible for any loss of data.

    And PLEASE - be careful when you open the unit. It's power supply is unshielded. Stay away from it.

    In short - if you don't _understand_ what is going on below, don't do it. Just being able to read a list of steps may not be enough at this point.

    When I refer to hard drive partitions on the Linux box, I'll use hdX where X is whatever letter is appropriate for that drive.

    I used a Quantum lct10 30 gig drive (part number QML30000LB-A) that I bought from www.onsale.com. My off the shelf Quantum seems to have the Quickview and TiVo extensions in it, perhaps they all do. It is the same drive used in HDR31202's and presumably the newer Sonys. Any drive may work as a B drive, but I've only tried my Quantum. Also be aware - the version of Linux on the TiVo doesn't seem to support drives larger than 33.8 gig. I don't know if TiVo patched their older kernel to support them. Set the B drive's jumper to slave.

    You need to be able to access the original A drive and new B drive from another Linux box. To do this on an x86 box, you need to integrate TiVo's modifications to the Mac partition code. There are some patches on ftp://ftp.curry.org/pub/tivo, ftp://ftp.rotorway.org/incoming/tivo, and http://www.wasteland.org/tivo. Please, if anyone can mirror these few files it would be very helpful. If we get hit too hard, we'll have to take the files down. You also need to be able to turn on byte swapping for those 2 drives (hdX=bswap). I had the most luck with Linux 2.4.0-test1. You also need to enable the Mac partitioning in the kernel.

    If that all works, you'll see the TiVo's partitions on the A drive hooked to your Linux box. There should be 11 of them. Mount partition 4 (hdX4) somewhere, it's an ext2 filesystem. Edit the bottom of etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit so it starts a bash shell on /dev/ttyS3. Also you need to blank out the first few sectors on the new B drive, with this command: "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=32".

    Get the hard drives back in the TiVo (both of em) and hook up the DSS serial cable to your computer. You'll need a null modem adapter and gender changer at the minimum. The terminal settings are 9600,8N1. You should get a bash prompt shortly after the "please wait a few more seconds" screen. Run this command: "/sbin/bootpage -D /dev/hdb". Then shut down your TiVo and hook the B drive back up to the Linux box.

    Now you need a modified version of pdisk which is available on the sites I mentioned above. Compile it if necessary (it's in RCS format). With the B drive in the Linux box, run "pdisk /dev/hdX" and type in these commands:

    i
    w
    y
    q

    Then run: "pdisk -d /dev/hdX" and type these commands:

    C 2p 4M "Second MFS application region" MFS
    C 3p 3p "Second MFS media region" MFS
    x
    m
    3
    x
    w
    y
    q

    That will create the new partitions. Shut down the Linux box now and mount the B drive in the TiVo permanently. Turn the TiVo back on and get into the bash shell on it again.

    You need to mount the diagnostics partition next. Type this on your TiVo: "mount -t ext2 -o ro /dev/hda7 /mnt". Then run this to add the magic bit sequence to your new B drive: "/mnt/diag/genAddDiskTiVoID /dev/hdb3". Type "umount /mnt" to unmount that diagnostics partition, and reboot your TiVo. That should do it. Check the system information and see if your capacity increased. If not, you can try this one last thing that I don't believe is necessary, but it might be: mount the diagnostics partition again, and run "/mnt/diag/setkeys -globalkeys /dev/hdb".

    That's it. If you want to now, you can edit the rc.sysinit to stop the bash shell from starting (or if you were smart, you made a backup copy when you started and can just copy the backup over the modified one).

    Credit for figuring out this procedure goes to cc, Peter Creath, TivoTechie, and Ron Curry.

    6/21/00

  • +1 Funny.

    But seriously, why does management constantly put focused-point suction engineers in charge of the HVAC!
  • By Linux 7 do you mean Slack 7? The kernel isn't even on 3.0 yet! That's a great distro, though I am thinking of switching to debian because they seem a little bit more hacker-friendly (Slack is easy to compile programs in and all, but Debian seems to have more enthusiasm as to what I can contribute).

  • With TiVO you have to pay a monthly fee to get their program guide listings. If someone came up with a good plan for a software package that would convince people to pay for listings, perhaps you could get some deal with TV Guide going (They bought prevue.)

    Personally, I'm just planning to buy a TiVO (Why reinvent the wheel? It's only $500 anyway and it has a nice interface) but I can see how you could get a lot of linux types interested - Linux users tend to want to prove that linux is capable of doing anything and everything.

  • The README file on that page says that the kernels were current as of version 1.2.0 and 1.2.1 of the TiVo software. My TiVo is currently running version 1.2.3.
  • I just bought a Tivo last night. Has anyone successfully added another big drive in thier Tivo?

    Another Question: Tivo has released thier patches to Linux kernel and other GNU utilities, but they are not releasing thier Tivo source code, right?

    By the way, they have a $50 dollars off the $200 dollars life time subscription program ending the end of this month. You can get a serial number from one of the tivo advocate sites.

    Lastly, a comment: First we saw i-opener being hacked, now that Tivo is getting hacked. I am not sure if this is a good thing for linux. It gives the industry an example: "Do anything with them Linux, you'd be hacked silly."
    Of course we know that it isn't that simple, but not many people understand it.

  • Re:New acronym! (Score:3)

    by Chubbyman ( 202180 ) on Thursday June 22, 2000 @03:58AM (#984262)
    How can you not know what Echelon is??? They make rollerblades!!!!
  • I am actually a bit more of a BSD person at heart. Slack was my first real jump into Linux, but I have a good deal more experience with actual Unix Sys V, BSD, and that ilk as well. I've tinkered with Debian. I just think that they, like the BSD projects, are a bit more in what I have to offer them, since I really never heard a "Yeah, you can help us with this" from good ole Pat V.
  • People on slashdot _love_ buying expensive things that are designed to do one specific task well and, like shoving the proverbial square peg into the proverbial round hole, force them to do other things poorly.

    Let's see if my brand new $500 WinCE handheld can run Linux! Why? What can it possibly be useful for? Who cares, it runs Linux! Let's see if my $499 TiVO can play MP3s! But it's supposed to be a VCR. Who cares, now I can play music with it (which I could've done with a $100 Pentium 90!) Let's use my digital camera as a backup device! Let's try telnetting from my Palm Pilot! Let's take the engine out of my car and convert it into a fucking house!

    Use the right tool for the job, people. Don't melt a hammer down and turn it into a screwdriver.

    Of course, this is just my viewpoint.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. This variety of hacking is perfectly legitimate. One day the L^Husers of the world will no the difference between hacking (aka cracking) and hacking (aka hacking). And it seems that your consulting business is better off in a world of terrified customers lining up to use your services. Linux will NEVER have an unsullied image in the world of the suits just as the suits are generally regarded with repugnance by most computer geeks (until they devolve into suits.) Boycott Coke, McDonalds, Disney, the lot!

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