Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Explore what the TiVo can do even before you pop the lid. This chapter is devoted to taking a look around the TiVo and discovering what tricks you can get it to do even without rearranging the internal bits.

Once you become a TiVo addict (and you quickly will), you are quickly going to want more hours on your box. You are going to want to record more television shows, and sometimes save an episode or two for a long period of time. This chapter details upgrading the storage capacity of your box.

While you have that lid open , why not try enabling a Bash prompt? Command-line access means your TiVo becomes that much more like any other PC in your home. The text interface and blinking cursor dramatically alters what you can twiddle and thus do with your TiVo.

Your TiVo should be part of your home network. Your desktop computer should be talking to and making requests of your TiVo. Your office computer, a couple of miles down the road, should be doing the same. Bringing the Internet all the way to your TiVo is not as difficult as it sounds. This chapter will show you how and some interesting things to do once you have your TiVo online.

Two solutions provide access to, and manipulation, of your TiVo over the Web: the official TiVo Home Media Option (HMO) and the open source TiVoWeb project. The former allows for remote programming and manipulation of your TiVo over the Web with all the simplicity you've come to expect from TiVo. The latter provides so much more than simple web access to your TiVo; it's a platform for Web-based TiVo-centric applications, extensible to your heart's content.

Regular TiVo users simply record their television shows to VCR tapes when they want to save something. But by this chapter you will no longer be a regular TiVo user , so let's talk about pulling and pushing video from and to your TiVo, archiving shows in full digital splendor on your home PC or burning them to DVD.

What if you want to write your own software for the TiVo? Here's a crash-course in writing programs for TiVo in Tcl and in C ”and a few nifty examples along the way.