TiVo Community Forums Archives - Considering Hacking a TIVO: Questions?

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Considering Hacking a TIVO: Questions?
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Posted by: ecreature

Hi folks,

I'm considering buying a TIVO and hacking it. I want
to have 2 or 3 TIVO-like devices in my home in different
rooms, use each TIVO as local primary MPEG storage, but
have a central server somewhere which I can use for
secondary MPEG storage. Also, I could then share TIVO
MPEG files through my broadband with other friends also
with TIVO and broadband.

There doesn't seem to be any way to put the TIVO on a
LAN directly, but there is the serial port, and apparently
users of this newsgroup have successfully run PPP over
the serial port.

Some questions:

Serial port: How fast can you run the serial port?
Can you jack it up to 115200 or 128000? How big is a
30 minute TIVO video file recorded in highest-quality
mode? I'm trying to figure out if I could transfer
these files over the serial port or if that would
just be too slow and painful.

Samba: Suppose I set up NFS on the TIVO and mounted
a remote volume (on an external linux box) via PPP &
the serial port. Could the TIVO play video files
actually located outside the TIVO itself? I imagine
it needs DMA to do the recording, but does it need
DMA to do the playback?

Is TIVO considering adding a NIC to their box anytime
soon?

Many thanx for your input...

Damon

Posted by: ecreature

Hi all,

I've done a bunch of research today, and found out that
the TIVO files (best quality) are about 1 gig per hour,
which makes the 115200 serial port WOEFULLY inadequate
to transfer them.

I also found the postings by the fellows who hacked an
ethernet card onto their TIVO and got about 1 meg per
second, so you could transfer a half hour show in about
8 mins (acceptable).

I am definitely going to buy a TIVO now and hack it
with ethernet.

Thanks,
Damon

Posted by: Worf

You *DO* know that at the moment, we *CANNOT* get the video out of the TiVo, right?

The ext2 partitions that we have access to are simply the OS + myworld partitions, and all the real data is stored in a (usermode driver) MFS region on the drive...

Posted by: omv

Even if the software issue was solved, the bandwidth issue is still a huge problem:

Its more like ~3 gigs/hour at Best Quality. Basic quality is somewhat less than 1 gig/hour, which is why they quote they quote the 30gig drives as 30hour.

You'd need about 6megabit / sec for Best Quality real time. DSL/cable probably won't be fast enough for real-time viewing. You'd need something like a T3 to have enough bandwidth + some to spare. For your internal net, you'd probably need 100baseT for everybody.

Posted by: jack

quote:
Originally posted by omv:
Even if the software issue was solved, the bandwidth issue is still a huge problem:

depends on if your talking about reading off of a disk via the
lan... or copying from the lan, to your TiVo and reading off of
the local disk. If the capability existed, I could live with
copying a file from the lan to the local drive, and then viewing
from that. http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/wink.gif

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jack
D.A.M. - Mother's Against Dyslexia

Posted by: ecreature

ARRRGGGH...

I did *not* understand that. For some (stupid) reason I thought
the TIVO stored video files under the linux file system. You
know, video1.tiv, video2.tiv, etc., and that I could just
shuffle those back and forth between the TIVO and an external
file server, tweak some TIVO system files accordingly, and
everything would work okay.

So it sounds like all the video files are stored on special raw
disk partitions written to by a special TIVO driver in some
unknown magical format? ACKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The guys from Australia who figured out how to add an ethernet
card to the TIVO say they did it "because they want to share
video over their home network". This implies they understand
the TIVO FS enough to do what I describe?

Sigh.

Posted by: HTH

quote:
Originally posted by ecreature:
The guys from Australia who figured out how to add an ethernet
card to the TIVO say they did it "because they want to share
video over their home network". This implies they understand
the TIVO FS enough to do what I describe?

You're not referring to that C|NET article, are you? That has a lot of misinformation seemingly designed to scare the crap out of TiVo executives and get them to end our fun.

Sharing TiVo video over a home network doesn't require Ethernet on the TiVo, nor does sharing it over the Internet. It only makes it a little bit easier to incorporate it into a residence already wired for Ethernet for better remote control with sendkey.tcl. The reporter just put sharing video together with Ethernet to make the story controversial when they are not linked.

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http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/tivo/HTH.gif