what is tivo? chapter

What Is TiVo?

What is TiVo? It’s a question that makes TiVo owners experiencetwo or three sensations at once. First, they cringe, as they’reforced to remember what watching television was like before

TiVo so they can relate to the person asking the question. Second, they feelexcited at the prospect of being able to describe such a quality-of-life-changing invention, and make this person’s life better. And somewhere inthere, there’s this slight, hidden feeling of dread, because they know it’s noteasy to really convey just how good a product it is.

“So it’s like a digital VCR?” invariably gets echoed back, often causing theTiVo owner to bite down hard or clench his/her fist, while patiently tryingto figure out which feature to talk about first to dispel this oversimplifica-tion.

And every TiVo owner who’s ever tried describing it to friends has at onetime or another briefly felt like he/she was part of a cult.

Unlike brainwashed cult members, though, TiVo owners get somethinghuge in exchange for membership: time, freedom, and unbelievable conve-nience.

I can’t remember a product that changed my day-to-day life more than myTiVo. I’ve never met anyone who owned one who didn’t love it. And by mylast count, at least 20 TiVos were purchased because of my evangelizing.

Ok, so why is it so great? What does it do? Why isn’t my VCR goodenough? Read on.

If you’re wondering what a chapter called “What Is TiVo?” isdoing in a book on TiVo hacking, let me explain. Every TiVoowner I know gets asked that question on a regular basis. Imyself had answered the question enough times that I wrote aweb page about it at http://keegan.org/tivo/ . Mythought is that this chapter will serve two purposes. First, it’s agood chapter to show to friends who want to know what TiVo is,when you’re too tired of explaining it to convey the messagewell. Second, for curious people browsing through the book, Ibelieve it’s a good intro. I know many people who purchased aTiVo with the initial intention of hacking it (to have a platform onwhich to write hacks for on their TV), who had never actuallyused TiVo.

˛ The Pitch

˛ Various Models

˛ Why Would I Wantto Open It Up?

chapter

in this chapter

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4 Part I — Nervously Observing from Afar

The PitchSince most people seem to ask if TiVo is like a digital VCR, I think that’s a good place to start.First, let me answer the question: Yes, TiVo is like a digital VCR. To put it in context though,TiVo is like a digital VCR in the same way that a butler is like a vending machine. The latter ishardly a good description of the former. A butler can take issues away from you and deal withthem entirely on his own, freeing you from having to deal with them. A butler can filter whatyou’re exposed to, to your liking. A butler can go out and fetch things for you upon demand. Abutler takes care of you.

There’s Always Something Good OnWith a VCR, you would almost always end up watching what you had recorded. If that weren’tthe case, over time you’d stop recording things. So for you to record something, it had to be avery deliberate act. And you had to justify those decisions too, because at most you can fit an 8-hour tape in a VCR. Unless you were prepared to have tapes pile up in your living room, youhad to watch what was on that tape before other shows came along (statistically speaking).

As a result, most people would never even consider having their VCR record something theydidn’t really want to see. The analogy that pops into my head is what it was like when we hadmetered Internet access. When people were charged by the hour for access to the web, therebetter have been a good justification for what they wanted to go fetch. Once a flat monthly ratecame along for Internet access, people started casually browsing. I can’t even count how manyGoogle searches I do in a day, but if it were metered it would be tough to justify. Even if it werecheap but still metered, there would still be a psychological need to be conservative.

That was how it was to record shows on a VCR. You only recorded the things that were onwhen you wouldn’t be around, or specific things that you really wanted to save. Most peopledidn’t record at all, but rather used their VCRs just to play rented movies, because of the incon-venience of recording things.

With TiVo, on the other hand, you can record shows with almost no effort, and there’s no costif you don’t watch them and let them expire. There’s no trying to find a blank videotape, or try-ing to find an older one to record over. This lets you have the freedom to record something ona whim, and decide later if you want to watch it or not.

With a VCR, I would never have bothered to record David Letterman each night. I’d eithercatch the show, or miss it, and I was fine with that. But with TiVo, you can tell it to alwayskeep five episodes of a show around (see Figure 1-1). If you don’t watch it, no big deal, it’ll bedeleted five episodes later. But when you do have a day when you sit down at the TV, you havethe option of watching Letterman — whenever you want.

Ok, but some overzealous TV enthusiast could still get that same benefit from a VCR if he orshe was diligent enough to switch tapes each night, right? Ok, try this on for size. You can cre-ate a WishList that records every talk show where Christopher Walken is mentioned in thedescription (or listed as an actor). That way if you’re not a Leno fan, but you really likeChristopher Walken, you can rest assured that you’ll have every guest appearance he makes onLeno (as well as other talk shows you might not have even known existed).

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FIGURE 1-1: Season pass recording options.

A better example is one I mentioned on my web site (http://keegan.org/). My wife and Iwere planning for our honeymoon to Hawaii. We created a keyword WishList for Hawaii and itstarted recording lots of travel shows on Hawaii, which was what we wanted. (It also ended uprecording the Brady Bunch episode where they went to Hawaii, so we changed the WishList tostill search for Hawaii but to be limited to the category “Arts and Living / Travel.”) It workedgreat. We didn’t even know these shows existed, nor did we know some of the channels existed.

And if that isn’t enough of a way to fill your TiVo with recordings, your TiVo will also recordshows on its own that it believes you will like, based on what it knows of your preferences. TiVoremotes have a Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down button (see Figure 1-2) that you use to rateshows and movies. When you see a show or movie you like, you give it up to three Thumbs Ups(and for things you don’t like, up to three Thumbs Downs). This lets it make suggestions (seeFigure 1-3) and then record the best of those suggested shows when nothing else is scheduled.

The whole point I’m getting at is that your TiVo will always be filled with shows and moviesthat you either requested or will probably like. When you finally get some free time that youwant to spend watching TV, why watch whatever random garbage happens to be on? TiVomeans never having to surf past an infomercial. TiVo means never settling for a show you’re notcrazy about. On a Sunday morning, would you rather watch the filler they placed there becauseno one would watch it, or see a movie TiVo recorded for you a few nights before?

Have your TiVo record every new episode of your favorite shows, and reruns of your favoriteclassics. Create WishLists to record a few Discovery Channel shows on topics you find inter-esting. All of these will be waiting for you when you want to watch TV. Now, there’s alwayssomething on, lots of things in fact, and they’re all things you will want to watch.

5Chapter 1 — What Is TiVo?

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FIGURE 1-2: Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down buttons.

FIGURE 1-3: TiVo’s Suggestions screen.

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Random Access — No Rewinding or CrammingWhen people went from audio cassettes to CDs, one of the huge benefits was random access.With a cassette, if you wanted to hear the 10th song you had to fast-forward, hit play to seewhere you were, maybe hit fast forward again, hit play, find that you had overshot it, then hitrewind, and hit play again. With a CD, all you needed to do was skip to track 10. This abilityto jump around turned out to be huge. Rewinding was a thing of the past.

The move from videotape to TiVo is similar, in two ways. First, consider the issue of havingmultiple recordings on one videotape. If you want to see a show three-quarters of the way intoa tape, you have to go through the same headache of fast-forwarding, overshooting, and so on.“Slow” fast-forwarding makes it slightly easier to see where you are, but the picture becomesunviewable. Plus, you’d better hope that’s the right tape, because even “fast” fast-forwarding an8-hour tape is very, very slow.

Second, once you get to the show you want, if you want to fast-forward through it to a particu-lar point, it’s slow, and you might skip past the end into the next show.

With TiVo, one button on your remote brings you to the Now Playing screen (see Figure 1-4).As you can see, you’re given a list of all of the recordings on your TiVo. From this list you canselect any recording and play it, delete it, or save it to VCR. You can set its expiration time(after which it will be eligible for deletion), or mark it as Save Until I Delete. The page with allof these options is shown in Figure 1-5. No more wondering which of many unlabeled tapes ashow is on; there are no tapes.

FIGURE 1-4: Now Playing screen.

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FIGURE 1-5: Now Playing recording description screen.

As for fast-forwarding within a show, a progress bar appears at the bottom of the screen displaying how far into the recording you are (see Figure 1-6). There are three different fast-forward/rewind speeds; 3, 18, or 60 times the normal speed. In addition, a skip button lets youeasily jump to the beginning or end of the entire recording instantaneously, as well as skippingforward or backward in 15-minute increments.

We’ve just glossed over another benefit TiVo has over tapes here. With tapes, you recordedsomething on a particular location of the tape, and that’s where it stayed. If you had recordedfour 2-hour shows on a tape and wanted to keep the third one, you either carefully recordedaround it, or threw in the towel and just kept the tape as is (with the other three unwantedrecordings). If you wanted to keep the first and third show, then you couldn’t record a 4-hourshow over the second and fourth (unwanted) shows, because the recordings were fixed in placeon the tape, and there was no space to cram it in.

No such limitation exists with TiVo. You can delete things when you want, schedule their expi-ration, and so on. The feature mentioned above about keeping five episodes of a show (“KeepAt Most - X”, where X can range from 1 to 5) actually does automatic deletion of older showswhen new ones are recorded.

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FIGURE 1-6: Progress bar, with one 15-minute tick mark.

The Power of TV Listings DataEach night, TiVo uses the phone line (or an Ethernet connection, if present) to call back homefor two weeks worth of TV Listings (“guide data”). This data allows it to provide someextremely cool features.

Scheduling Recordings Is a JokeMy wife and I just had our first child, a beautiful girl named Emily Laryssa Keegan. SomedayI’m going to have to explain to Emily that people used to subscribe to TV listing magazines (orbuy them in stores), bring them home, and keep them near the TV. When you sat down, you’dlook for the right issue, thumb through it to the right day, then scan down the list to find whatwas on TV. I expect to feel very old when I tell that story.

When you hear about a new show or movie from a friend and decide you want to record it, allyou need to know is the name of the show. You don’t need to know what channel it’s on, andyou certainly don’t have to know what day or time it’s on. Figure 1-7 shows what the Search ByTitle screen looks like. Start entering the name of a show or movie, and a listing appears on theright. Select the one you want, and tell TiVo to record it (see Figure 1-8). That’s it. If it’s ashow (with multiple episodes), you have the option of creating something called a Season Pass.A season pass will record every episode of the show, though you can tell it to ignore reruns ifyou want. Figure 1-1 shows the choices you can make when creating a season pass.

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FIGURE 1-7: Search By Title screen.

FIGURE 1-8: Search By Title program description screen.

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No More Missing “Special Episodes”Once you’ve created a Season Pass for a show, that’s it, you don’t have to do any more. Supposethat next week Alias is going to be on a special night, Tuesday instead of Sunday. Plus, it’s a 2-hour episode instead of 1. With TiVo, you don’t have to care about any of this. Because theguide data is fetched every night, changes to the schedule are picked up and handled appropri-ately. Your TiVo will record Alias; it doesn’t matter when it’s on, or how long the episode is. Ifit turns out there’s another show you record on Tuesdays (in this example), then TiVo looks at a prioritized list called the Season Pass Manager where you’ve said which shows have what priority.

WishListsAs I previously mentioned in my Hawaii vacation example, TiVo lets you create WishLists tosearch for things to record. Your searches can look for actors, directors, particular categories, orjust keywords (either in just the title or in the descriptions as well). The guide data TiVofetches each night is extremely detailed, containing such items as the director, writer, genre,title, description, episode number, first air date, and a list of actors.

When new movies come out that you don’t really want to see in the theater, set up a WishListfor them, and months later be pleasantly surprised to find them on your TiVo. Like Westerns?Create a category WishList for Movies/Western , and set it up to keep three around at anygiven time. Better yet, create an actor WishList for Clint Eastwood, limited to the categoryMovies/Western.

There’s also a hidden feature called Advanced WishLists, which you can use if you enter back-door mode first (see Chapter 2). Advanced WishLists let you create even more combinations,and specify a requirement for individual terms. For example, you could create a WishList for allepisodes of Saturday Night Live where either Tom Hanks, Al Gore, or Conan O’Brien hosted.Another example is an Advanced WishList that looks for Comedies in which both WalterMatthau and Jack Lemmon performed.

On-Screen Program DescriptionsAnother thing I’ll have to tell Emily about someday is the strange thing that used to some-times happen to you where you’d change channels, see some movie, and not remember what itwas. Sometimes (rarely), you’d even go find that magazine and look up what was supposed tobe on that channel right now, just to find out.

With TiVo, any time you’re watching something, be it live or recorded, one button press willdisplay the show, episode name (if it’s a recurring show), and a description of the recording (seeFigure 1-9). TiVo is not the first device to do this (satellite receivers certainly do it, and manycable boxes now do as well), but it’s nice to always have, and it certainly performs quicker thanmy cable box.

If you’re at the Now Playing program description screen, you’ll see something similar to Figure1-5, conveying the same info plus a little more. From there, if you press Display (or enter onolder remotes), you can see even more program details, including more of the actors, theepisode number, and the original air date, as in Figure 1-10.

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FIGURE 1-9: On-screen recording description, while watching video.

FIGURE 1-10: Program details screen.

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Record and View Recorded Show at Same TimeThis feature usually confuses people when it’s first mentioned to them. A TiVo owner says,“You can record a show while watching another recorded show,” and the response is, “I thinkmy VCR lets me do that already. Can’t I watch something while taping something else?” Thething is, I’m not talking about recording something then watching another live channel; I’mtalking about recording something at the same time that I watch another previously recordedshow that’s on the TiVo. Unless the person is talking about a dual-deck VCR, which could holdtwo tapes at once, then no, a VCR can’t do that.

What this means is that there’s never a time when you can’t watch some show you’ve recorded.There is no, “you can’t use the TV now, I’m taping soap operas” moment, ever. It doesn’t matterif TiVo is recording something while you’re watching something else; in fact, that’s very likelyto happen, because TiVo might be recording suggestions for you. And since your TiVo isalways full of things you want to watch, the things you want are sitting right there, available toyou all the time.

This does lead to the questions: “Well what if I wanted to watch CNN, live, while somethingelse is recording?” and “Can I record two different shows at the same time?”

Standalone users (see “Various Models,” below) are out of luck. There is only one tuner in astandalone box, so it can only record one channel at a time. DirecTiVo users (combo users)with a dual dish, however, can do just that. DirecTiVo users can record one program, whilerecording another, at the same time as they watch a third, previously recorded program. They canalso watch one program live while recording another. This is because DirecTiVos don’t haveany tuners; they grab already-encoded digital data straight from the satellite.

Watch Any Part of What’s Already RecordedPicture yourself driving home to watch your favorite TV show. It starts at 9:00 P.M., and yourVCR is set up to record it. You get home at 9:15.

What do you do? You have three choices:

1. Start watching now, from 9:15 until the end, then rewind the tape to see the now-anti-climactic beginning of the show. Go to bed around 10:20.

2. Wait around twiddling your thumbs for 45 minutes, so you can see it all as it’s supposedto be seen, rewind at 10:00, and watch it whole. Go to bed around 11:00 (rewindingmight be offset if you fast-forward through commercials).

3. Give up, do something else, go to bed whenever, and watch it another day.

Those choices are pretty lousy, but that’s all you get with a VCR. And if you pick number 3,the “something else” can’t involve watching recorded shows, because your VCR is in use.

TiVo owners in this situation would take their time getting home, and at 9:15 would simplystart watching the show, from the beginning. When a recording is under way, you can fast-forward and rewind anywhere you want within the recorded portion. The progress bar at thebottom of the screen shows how much of the show has been recorded, and where you currentlyare within the recording (see Figure 1-11).

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In fact, when a show comes on at 9:00, I usually wait until around 9:15–9:20 to start watchingit anyway (usually watching some other recorded show until 9:20). Why? Because then when Iget to commercials, there is buffered TV ahead of me, so I can skip over them. That’s the otherbenefit I didn’t mention yet — the TiVo users getting home at 9:15 in the above example get tofinish watching by 10:00, because they were able to skip commercials.

Another great example of this is watching the presidential debates. I set our TiVo up to recordthe debate, and we watched it live. At one point, I said, “did he really say that??” and werewound to hear the last minute of video again. This is another great example of somethingthat wouldn’t be practical with a VCR; if you were taping the debate, and wanted to see whatwas just said, you’d have to either give up recording (hit stop, then rewind a few minutes, butcompletely miss seeing what’s said while you’re looking at the past minute), or wait until theentire debate was over and rewind to exactly that point, all to hear some sentence you missed,that you probably no longer care about.

Only Watch the Commercials You Want ToMost TiVo users give up watching live TV within a few weeks. The reason is that it’s alwaysgood to be behind enough that you can skip commercials. What I’ve found is that there aresome commercials I actually rewind to watch. Those commercials tend to get special treatmenttoo if you think about it, because they have my complete attention. One can hope that this willraise the bar for what makes an effective ad; hopefully, they’ll all be more interesting someday.

FIGURE 1-11: Progress bar during live recording.

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Oh Yeah, You Can Pause and Rewind Live TVWhen watching some random show on live TV, you can always hit pause. It will buffer up to30 minutes. When you finally un-pause, you’re now behind-live, which is great because it givesyou buffer space to skip the next commercial. You can also rewind to see anything in the last 30minutes of TV that has been on (the buffer is cleared when you change the channel though).So if you’re walking through the room and see something interesting out of the corner of youreye, you can go back and see what it was.

In fact, if you hit Record while watching live TV, you can save the last 30 minutes of video(back to the beginning of the current show), as well as the rest of the show.

Delayed Gratification — Poor Man’s Video-On-DemandThere is a very strange (and yet cool) sort of delayed gratification you can get from schedulingmovies to be recorded, that almost acts like a poor man’s video-on-demand.

Every once in a while, I’ll try looking through what movies are coming up in the next twoweeks. I do this by performing a search-by-title, under the category Movies, then entering “A”or “0” to get near the top of the list of movies. I’ll walk down the list, looking for movies I wantto see. I’ll find a few, schedule them, maybe give some Thumbs-Ups to other movies I haven’trated yet, then I’m done and I go find something else to do.

A few days later, after I’ve completely forgotten scheduling anything, the recording shows upon my TiVo. I describe it as a small investment — I make the future me happy by schedulingthings for him now.

Pay Channels Are Now Much More ValuablePay channels such as HBO used to be a bit of a chore. They used to have their own programguide that was mailed to your house each month, telling you what movies were on when. If youdidn’t glance at it (which I certainly didn’t do a lot), there was this slight nagging feeling thatyou weren’t watching it enough for it to be worth the money.

But now, there’s a direct benefit. The more channels there are (especially from the same net-work, such as HBO4, HBO5, HBO6), the larger the base of movies that will be on in the nexttwo weeks. More of these channels makes it an almost certainty that when someone tells me Ihave to see some movie, it’ll be on sometime within the next two weeks.

With 24 hours in a day, there are plenty of movies that channels air within two weeks. Youdon’t have to be up anymore, or commit a VCR (with an SP tape, precluding the recording ofanything else), just to get some movies out of your pay-channel subscription. Just schedulesome recordings. Or set up some WishLists. Or let TiVo find stuff for you on its own. Thebottom line is, the source of content just became more worthwhile.

Keep Things around as Long as You WantHaving something important to you on videotape is okay, but how often do you actually botherto get up, walk across the room, pick up that old tape, dust it off, stoop down to put it in your

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VCR, walk back across the room, sit down, and then watch it? (And don’t give me that “at leastit’s exercise” bit — walking to get videotapes shouldn’t be your only exercise.)

The answer is, not often. No one really bothers to do that. And even if you do, your friendsprobably don’t, so if something comes up in conversation where you want to show them thatquick moment from the tape — forget it. During the commotion/ordeal of finding the tape,inserting it, rewinding it, and getting everything ready, your friends will have either secretlysnuck out, or they’ll have been acting polite out of kindness while you’ve bored them to death.

Instead of keeping those moments on tape, keep them on your TiVo. Here’s an example: myMom was on TV (see Figure 1-12).

See? None of you put the book down. Ok, in fairness all I had to say was “see Figure 1-12”, butcompared to digging through a pile of videotapes etc, showing someone something stored onyour TiVo is just as easy.

If you jump through a hoop or two, you can even store a copy of your own video (from a cam-corder, for instance) on your TiVo. I talk about how to do that in Chapter 11. That’s why myTiVo also has video of Laurie and me with our baby Emily on the day she was born (seeFigure 1-13).

FIGURE 1-12: My mom on TV, easily accessible on my TiVo.

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FIGURE 1-13: Emily Laryssa Keegan’s first day, waiting for her on our TiVo.

See? Keep what you want to watch readily accessible — otherwise why have it at all?

Various ModelsOriginally, there were two different types of TiVo devices: Standalone TiVos, which accept RF,RCA audio/video, and S-Video inputs, and combo units (DirecTiVos), which are also DirecTVreceivers, but can only accept input from the DirecTV dish.

The next distinction came when TiVo announced a new hardware platform for TiVo devices:TiVo Series2. (Older boxes were then referred to as Series1 standalones or Series1 combounits.) The new Series2 boxes also came in standalone and combo unit varieties.

All of the existing TiVo models currently fit into these four categories (Series1 standalone,Series1 combo, Series2 standalone, Series2 combo). A high-definition television (HDTV)-compatible TiVo is expected within a year. Rumors have it that this new HDTV TiVo willbridge the gap between the two types, by accepting DirecTV input as well as video input froman antenna.

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Standalone versus ComboThere are a few important differences between standalone units and combo units. The first ofthose is video quality. Standalone units let the user choose from one of four video quality set-tings: basic, medium, high, and best. Combo unit owners don’t get (or need) a choice — they’realways in best quality.

The reason for this is that the quality setting in standalone units is a function of their internalvideo encoder. DirecTiVos don’t have an encoder; the datastream received from the satellitedish is already digitally encoded. Furthermore, the encoding for DirecTV streams happensbefore uplink to the satellite, with much more expensive encoders than the cheap encoder instandalone TiVos. This allows the DirecTV stream to be much more highly compressed, withbetter video quality to boot. As a result, DirecTiVo users adding an 80-gig drive will addaround 70 hours (of “best” quality), whereas standalone users adding an 80-gig drive will addonly 28 hours of best quality (or 96 hours of basic quality).

Another big advantage for DirecTiVo users is that they have a fiber-optic Digital Audio Outjack, that outputs 5.1 surround sound.

Hacking-wise, one downside of the DirecTiVo units is that with later versions of the TiVosoftware, they have been locked down to a certain extent. The firmware on a DirecTiVo worksin conjunction with the kernel to attempt to eliminate any user-added software hacks(although extra storage capacity is left alone). Software exists to flash the programmable read-only memory (PROM) to allow hacks to exist. I won’t be describing that here (for legal rea-sons), but you should be able to find out something with a few searches at dealdatabase.com.

Series1 versus Series2The second generation of TiVo devices (labeled Series2) were announced around the beginningof 2002 (at which point people started referring to the previous units as Series1). Series2 unitsare based on a MIPS processor (as opposed to the PPC — also known as PowerPC — processorin Series1 devices). The new units are faster, physically smaller, and have two USB (UniversalSerial Bus) ports in the back.

They also are heavily locked down, hack-wise. Like all TiVos, you can add new drives (thoughwith some units, you need a special mounting bracket and it’s a tight squeeze), or expand exist-ing drives. Unfortunately though, like the Series1 DirecTiVos with new software, the firmwareworks in conjunction with the kernel to make sure no new software (or config file changes)survive.

Even worse, the PROMs don’t seem to be flashable, so Series2 units remain ineligible for mostof the hacks in this book, without de-soldering the PROM and replacing it with a modifiedversion. That also is certainly not something I’ll describe here, but there are some interestingdiscussions at tivocommunity.com.

Existing ModelsHere is a list of the existing models at the time I’m writing this. By the time this goes to press,there will probably be other units available as well. Do searches on tivocommunity.com forinformation about a model that isn’t listed here.

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To determine which is right for you, first look at whether or not you have DirecTV. If you haveit, you’ll want a DirecTiVo; if not, you’ll need a standalone. Series2 units are newer, easier tofind, and have some more features, but they’re difficult to hack and won’t work well with mostof this book. Series1 units may be a bit slower but they’re wide open and much easier to playaround with. They’re not made anymore, so you’ll have to buy one someplace like eBay or else-where on the web.

Table 1-1 TiVo Models

Model# / SKU# Description

HDR110 / R00100 Philips 14-hr Standalone (Series1)

(also known as PTV100) “A” drive: 13.6 GB


(also known as PTV100) “A” drive: 13.6 GB (or 13.7 GB)


(also known as PTV200) “A” drive: 22 GB


(also known as PTV300) “A” drive: 13.6 GB, “B” drive: 13.6 GB1


(also known as PTV300) “A” drive: 13.6 GB, “B” drive: 13.6 GB

HDR312XX / R00300 Philips 30-hr Standalone (Series1)

(where XX is 01, 02, etc) “A” drive: 30 GB


“A” drive: 30 GB, “B” drive: 30 GB

or


DSR6000 / RC0300 Philips 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series1)

(with serial # <= 47039999) “A” drive: 30 GB, “B” drive: 15 GB

DSR6000 / RC0300 Philips 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series1)

(with serial # >= 47040000) “A” drive: 40 GB

SVR2000 / RS0300 Sony 30-hr Standalone (Series1)

“A” drive: 30 GB (or 40 GB)

Sat-T60 / RSC300 Sony 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series1)

(with serial # <= 8009999) “A” drive: 30 GB, “B” drive: 15 GB

Continued

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Table 1-1 (continued)

Model# / SKU# Description

Sat-T60 / RSC300 Sony 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series1)

(with serial # >= 8010000) “A” drive: 40 GB

GXCEBOT / RHC300 Hughes 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series1)

“A” drive: 40 GB

PVR10UK / RTU400 Thompson 40-hr Standalone (Series1, UK-only)


or


TCD130040 / R13040 AT&T 40-hr Standalone (Series2)


TCD230040 / R23040 AT&T 40-hr Standalone (Series2)


Note: Made for one drive, needs special S2 bracket

TCD140060 / R14060 TiVo-branded 60-hr Standalone (Series2)







SVR-3000 / R11080 Sony 80-hr Standalone (Series2)


HDVR2 / R15140 Hughes 35-hr DirecTiVo (Series2)



1 This is a guess, because I can’t find data on which sized drives shipped with this model.

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Why Would I Want to Open It Up?With such an incredible product, one might ask why is there any desire to open it up? Isn’t itgood enough? What’s the point in messing with it?

There are many reasons why people hack their TiVos. The first reason, which applies to mostTiVo owners, is to expand your TiVo’s storage capacity. A 200-hour TiVo certainly has itsappeal, when you consider the suggestions it records for you, the WishLists you might create tokeep your TiVo full, and the favorite episodes that you want to keep around.

Then, there are the existing software projects that have been created to put on your TiVos.TivoWeb (which is discussed in Chapter 7) lets you control your TiVo from a web browser.Series2 users are able to pay for such a service as part of the Home Media Option (HMO), butTiVo hackers have had this ability for years, it’s much more feature-rich, and it’s an open plat-form that you can write your own modules for.

TiVo Control Station lets you display weather, sports, stock quotes, and eBay auctions (amongother things) on your TV screen. It also is an open platform that allows you to write your ownmodules for it.

Other hacks let you display closed captioning, caller-ID info, and photos on screen as well.

But aside from the storage capacity upgrade, one of the best reasons to want to open up yourTiVo is to have fun hacking around in it. It’s a platform that happens to be connected up toyour television, most likely the Internet, and your sound system. It’s like writing software foryour TV.

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what is tivo? chapter

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