Tivo standalone hack

Any ideas? Thanks TC. I'm assuming you mean a stand alone DVR that doesn't require service? Yes there are hacks but are not talked about since that is equivalent to stealing service from TiVo and is greatly frowned upon.

Although there will probably be TiVo service for the next decade regardless of the lies Sean posts , if the TiVo service ever did disappear, the hacks to get the TiVos to work without service would be made public. Kenny Distinguished. Feb 9, 0 18, 0. If S2 Tivos are not already stand alone dvr's, what are they?

In other words you cannot set the Tivo to record channel 13 at 8pm on Monday evening without having a Tivo subscription. At least that's the way I understand it. Cheers TC. I don't see how this is "stealing" from Tivo however.

All I want to do is to be able to set a time, date and channel and record a program. All manually. After all I do own the hardware. I have no complaints with Tivo, but that doesn't mean I will always use the service. I may even upgrade the hardware down the road when Tivo HD becomes more cost effective but I might want to use the old box as a stand-alone device.

You bought the hardware, which is yours to do as you please. If you want to use the OS and apps currently installed on that hardware as a DVR however, you need service. If you want to put your own OS on the hardware, you can, but you have to pay for service to use what is currently there. Those are just the rules for the item you purchased. Trying to circumvent this rule from TiVo is equivalent to theft of service since it's the capability to record shows among other things that is what the TiVo service provides.

Sean Distinguished. Dec 31, 0 18, 0. Is your precious cable company screwing it's customers too, since you can't even keep the box without a subscription? Hell the minute you cancel, you probably lose access to the box. And the minute yout tivo shits the bed you're screwed out of your "lifetime" subscription. I can drop an anvil on my cable dvr and have it replaced for free. You break it, you've bought it.

The series 2 Tivo is a stand alone Tivo dvr. The fact that a sub. Again, in the context of the OP's question this seems incorrect.

Its not about definitions, its about context. One sequence turns on tivovbi [Hack 42] , while others display sports scores on the screen, check the weather forecast—as if you have any intention of going outdoors any time soon ;- —or look up stock quotes. Fire up your favorite text editor Section 3. This is a really long file that contains every configuration option the TCS needs. This command should return you to the prompt immediately and—despite no confirmation at all—the TCS should be running in the background, awaiting remote control sequences.

Do not simply kill the TCS processes. The TiVo Control Station is built on top of tivosh , the underlying shell that controls most interapplication messaging in the TiVo. So, what can the TCS do for you? TiVo used that information to determine which phone numbers your TiVo should call to download programming information and software updates.

The TiVo Control Station co-opts this information for determining your geographical location and finding out what the weather is like in your area.

Whilst either playing a recorded program or watching live television, point your remote control at your TiVo and hit:.

If, instead, you issue the following remote control sequence, the TCS will retrieve and display a national weather map like the one shown in Figure :. TiVo Control Station to the rescue! Table lists all the sports scores the TCS can make available to you, along with their associated remote control sequences.

The one caveat on all this TCS fun is that the fun is not free—at least when it comes to computing cycles, that is. You will have to telnet back in [Hack 33] and start the system from the command line before you can use it again.

Stocks more your game? Display the latest stock scores—quotes, that is—on your television set. Page up and down using the Channel Up and Channel Down buttons on your remote. The indexes and stocks you see in Figure are the default set preconfigured in the TiVo Control Station bundle.

Put the ticker symbol first on the line, followed by a human-readable version if you prefer. The stock quotes are probably one of the most intensive modules in the entire TCS lineup, because it grabs updates for each and every quote, every minute, Monday through Friday, a. Take a virtual trip to a far-off tropical locale, without ever leaving your recliner. While your TiVo is not going to beam you up to a tropical locale, perhaps it can provide some virtual heat.

What about putting up live pictures from the Web, perhaps of some place you would rather be? Thanks to the dual miracles of webcams and wget [Hack 54] , you can do just that. Grab a copy of wget for your PC. Install wget using the instructions provided with the application. On my Mac, I type:.

If all goes to plan, you should be transported—in mind at least—to your tropical paradise. Your first instinct may be to use the Windows Task Scheduler. However, the smallest time interval it can work with is 1 hour. Download, install, and start WinCron. Click the Add button to bring up an interface to adding a new scheduled task see Figure Use the same wget command line that I used to grab the webcam image and paste it into the Command field.

Make sure to specify the right path to wget wget. Once you have all that squared away, set it up to run the command every five minutes. Setting up this repeating task in OS X is easy using cron [Hack 44].

Up comes your existing or a new crontab— in the vi text editor, most likely. Set the last line of your crontab to:. Of course, you should replace the URL with the URL appropriate for the webcam that you are accessing, and you should also replace the download directory with the one on your Mac that the TiVo is going to be accessing.

Save the updated crontab file and your Mac will, once every 5 minutes, download a fresh image and put it into the shared HMO directory. Go back to the image on your TiVo and select it as a slideshow running with repeats, as shown in Figure And just leave it.

As more and more images come in, the slideshow loop will get longer and longer, making it more possible for you to dream that you are actually there. But what of those online music broadcasts, streamed talk shows, and specials? Save the following code to a file named m3ugen. Mac OS X should alter the first line to point to the proper location of Perl:.

The script will visit www. Select it and listen to some of the finest punk music streamed over the Net. If the stream pauses due to traffic congestion or any other problem, the HMO will just punt it and move on. Is a picture indeed worth a thousand words? That depends on how many words are in the picture. Tobias Hoellrich comes through again with mailrender.

An interface for talking to POP3 mail servers. Save the following code to a file named mailrender. Next, configure the script for your email particulars by changing the default settings in the accounts array called out in bold in the previous script.

Notice that I have only one account listed. You want to set the DESC to be a description of the email account, and setting it to your email address is just fine.

The script will download but not delete your email and render a slew of PNG image files like the one shown in Figure You can have mailrender. Pictures placed in your HMO-shared images directory will be snatched up by the HMO, ready to be displayed along with those family photos, as shown in Figure Have fun reading—or watching, to be precise—your email. Listen to your email as an MP3 audio stream—just because you can. Just when you thought pictures of your email [Hack 61] was over the top, someone had to go and take it even further.

Save the following code to a file named mail2mp3. With this magic running, your email will be downloaded but not deleted. Your computer will start silently talking to itself and recording itself see Figure Skip to main content. TiVo Hacks by Raffi Krikorian. Start your free trial. Chapter 4. Bring the Internet to TiVo. Hacks Tip Your TiVo unit, version of the TiVo operating system, or remote control may use different buttons for special characters.

Table TiVo dialing prefixes and associated PPP connection baud rates. TiVo dialing prefix PPP baud rate , 9, , 38, , 57, , , Go To. Configuring Windows. Tip These instructions are close, but not identical, to those necessary for Windows Figure The Add Hardware Wizard asking whether or not it should detect your modem.

Network Connections, listing all the valid network interfaces currently configured. Allowing directly connected devices to connect without a password. This starts up the VI editor. I'm not going to tell you how to use it as there are many, many websites that explain the VI editor in detail.

Do a search. Bash and telnet are already on the TiVo. Tivoftpd and fakecall. If necessary, change the IP address of The gateway address of If you did not rename dhclient earlier, you can delete or comment out these lines.

TiVo will attempt to find the files and execute them, but will fail, and just skip down to the next command. Plug the TiVo back in and cross your fingers. If all goes well, you should be able to telnet to the IP address of the TiVo ex. Congratulations, your TiVo is hacked! The following are some of the most common hacks, depending on what you want to do. While the hard drive is in the TiVo, the 4th and 7th partitions are read only. You will need to issue the following command before you can modify files on those partitions:.

The Superpatch takes care of most of these, but not all. May I also recommend the 30 second skip, which is in post 2. Post 13 explains how to format the command. For example, if you have a DirecTiVo with version 6. The default port number is You will need to download 3 separate archives and extract the files to the same directory, thereby copying over outdated versions.

The original author's license restricts someone from redistributing a working archive. For the dates and times to be accurate, you will need tzoffset. You will need to change the number depending on the time zone you are in. The value is the number of seconds between your time zone and GMT time.

For Eastern, the offset is 5 hours difference x 60 x Central is Mountain is Pacific is On this second drive, you'll need a few downloaded files. Here's how to get them You'll need a virgin kernel to apply the killhdinitrd patch.

The first post in the link above has information as to which version of the kernel you can use for your particular TiVo, and the second post has information on where you can download them.

Download sites frequently appear and disappear. Also check out the Backup image and slice begging thread or do a Google search. The 7. This CD image will also come in handy for the next section.

Download tivotools. Download iptables. Download rc. Copy iptables and rc. Here is a quick and dirty Linux command line primer For software versions 6. For everything above version 6. Here is what my rc. When you are done, copy the rc. Allows you to do complicated searches for upcoming programs and record them.

This one is highly recommended! Superpatch Does several things including automatically disabling encryption and enabling the home media option. For DirecTivo version 6. Works with any operating system with the Java Runtime Environment installed. You will need to extract the. There is a fakecall. This version will. Last updated September 8, Custom Search.