Claude Felizardo
San Gabriel Valley Linux Users Group
Pasadena, CA
I've got mixed feeling about this book. I think it could have been much better but it didn't quite deliver in some areas based on some expectations i had before reading it.
First, let me say that I started hacking my TiVo back in early 2001 just after I got one as a Christmas present from my wife. I had been reading about the various hacks on the web for several months and had decided on a TiVo because it was so open to hacking, the very active TiVo hacking community, and of course it used Linux! Using information from the net, I was able to replace my original 30 GB disk for an 80 GB disk, install the TivoNet network card and started playing with caller-id. I had even installed the TivoWeb server but that was as far as I got and eventually lost interest in hacking my TiVo. Of course, this was fine with the family since I was interfering with their TiVo viewing.
Fast forward a few years to last November when I got a copy of "Tivo Hacks" and started flipping through the book. I tried some of the "safer" hacks I had missed before but had to wait until the long Thanksgiving weekend when the family would be out of town visiting in-laws and I'd have TiVo all to my self to try out the more interesting hacks. By the time they got back, I had a bunch of new things to show off:
how to rename recordings of my daughter's baton performances which had been recorded off the local community access channel.
using TiVo Control Station to watch the radar maps showing the rain in Atlanta and the nice sunshine in Los Angeles.
Most of the hacks I had already tried by the time I got the book but it was very convenient to have them all collected in one place w/o having to constantly search the net. I wish I had the book back when I first did my backups and replaced the hard disk which I had to do twice when the larger drive failed a year later and had to be exchanged. By then it was much easier with MFS Tools which is described in the book. Then there's all the common Linux tools that have been ported to TiVo and are described in the book as well.
I definely liked hack #96 which explained how to change the padding options including negative padding though there was a typo which I reported to the errata web page. This hack nicely solves the problem of trying to schedule back to back recordings where one show starts early and you want the previous recording to end early.
However, I was disappointed with the hacks regarding the Home Media Option. How could information that should be in a manual be considered a hack? I have a Series 1 so I can never use HMO so I was looking for hacks on how to set up my own photo album or play mp3's w/o having to perform a lobotomy on my TiVo.
Recently I've started extracting video using the hacks described in the book. Again, I had read about this on the Internet but it sounded too complicated. The author started off by describing the Media File System and how to pull video off using FTP then moved on to using a web browser. Next he covered how to view the extracted video on a PC and then how to convert the files to a more standard video format.
This has been very helpful when we want to save recordings of our daughter's baton performances. I wasn't happy with the quality of using a video capture card to record the analog signal so I had been planning on extracting the files. But because it looked too complicated, I had been filling up our TiVo with a few multi-hour airings from the local community access channels when all we wanted was a short 2-5 minute clip. Now I've been able to extract all the saved shows, convert the short clips to mpg files and burn them to a CD for the grandparents.
I did like the organization of the book and the logical progression of the hacks in the later chapters, especially those regarding networking and extracting video. Even though I had installed TivoWeb earlier, it wasn't until after I had read the descriptions in the book that I figured out how to use the various features and add-ons.
I think a CD containing all of the software would have been extremely useful rather than having to download from the net, especially when some of the URLs have changed or the usage of the tools have changed slightly since the book was published.
All in all, a must have book if you are hacking your TiVo for the first time but even experienced TiVo hackers can still benefit by having all the information collected in one place with helpful descriptions.
BTW, they do have some of the hacks available online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/tivohks/
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