Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement and Development Starter Kit (ExtremeTech)

In Hacking TiVo, Jeff Keegan proves that the TiVo television-recording device is far more than an enhancement to the passive lifestyle. By showing his readers how to use known tricks and all-purpose resourcefulness (plus some online community resources), Keegan shows how to make the TiVo perform far beyond its advertised purpose. He provides a chef's tour of the versatile appliance, calling attention to non-invasive tricks (like entering Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select to skip exactly 30 seconds ahead in a recording to bypass an ad) before moving on to more drastic kinds of fun. By the time you're through with Keegan's guide to the TiVo, you'll have it working as a more or less complete Unix workstation, accessible over the Internet via the excellent TivoWeb interface, and showing home videos, telephone caller ID information, and instant-messaging communications on your television screen.

This book mostly is concerned with software hacks, which will void your TiVo warranty as surely as anything involving a soldering iron, but which have the advantage of usually being reversible. Though he says the hacks in this book will work on TiVo Series1 and Series2, he doesn't explain how to defeat the systems' anti-intrusion mechanisms (which prevent the installation of software, and thus preclude the performance of about half the hacks in this book). This appears to be an exclusion for legal reasons, and he points out that the information is easily found on the Internet. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to make your TiVo do more of what you want. Instructions show how to add a bigger hard drive (for greater recording time), access the TiVo's bash command line, use unsupported command sequences, and share files between your TiVo and your networked personal computer. Particularly neat sections deal with using TivoWeb and putting Caller ID information on-screen.