Tivo usb hack

Activating the Node Navigator Enabling Advanced WishLists Turning Off the TiVo Software Applaud the TiVo Team 2. Adding More Hours 2. Hacks 2. Basic Assumptions 2. Opening the Box Restoring from Backup The TiVo Shell 3. Hacks Poking Around Installing the less Pager on Your TiVo Displaying Images on Your TV Putting Text on the Screen Running the Same Thing Over and Over Hacking the Hack Playing MP3s on your TiVo 4.

Bring the Internet to TiVo 4. Fetching Files from the Web Setting Up an FTP server Reading Email on Your TiVo TiVo and the Web 5. Signing Up for the Home Media Option Scheduling a Recording with TiVoWeb Deleting Scheduled Recordings Undeleting Recordings Windows egotistically assumes that anybody connecting to it is going to say CLIENT over the serial line to get its attention. Scroll down quite a way until you run into a section that looks something like this:.

Your computer should chug away awhile as it compiles a list of modems from which to make your selection. Click Next. Click Next, and Windows will set up the connection. It should report that all went well, leaving you to click the Finish button to leave the Wizard.

The modem is now set up, so you can go ahead and click the OK button back at Phone and Modem Options. From the Control Panel, select Network Connections. Up comes the Network Connections window, shown in Figure Click Next to begin creating a new network connection. Select the option and click Next. A dialog box asks what kind of connection you want—whether the PC is going to be receiving or sending data. Click Next again. The Wizard will ask you what users are allowed to connect.

Your TiVo is expecting to use the serial connection to access your home network and the Internet. Click OK to close the dialog box. Go back to the Network Connections window, and you should now see a shiny new incoming connection. Right-click on the connection and select Properties to bring up the Incoming Connections Properties.

The TiVo has no notion of a password. Last step—I promise. While this may be hard for Windows users to believe, Linux configuration for accepting a PPP connection from TiVo is considerably less involved. Note that this configuration makes a couple of assumptions, both easily changeable. TiVo will now use this connection each time it makes its daily call. After a successful trial at 9, baud, take things up a notch or two on both the TiVo and PC ends they must match to work and see if you can work your way up to downloading program data at a top speed of , baud see Table for the associated TiVo dial prefixes.

The Series 1 TiVo was not designed with networking in mind. While the Series 2 was designed from the start with networking in mind—albeit via the USB port—the earlier Series 1 units simply were not built for a networked world. Case closed, right? Not by a long shot!

Unlike the TiVoNET, the new board does not need external power, grabbing juice right from your TiVo itself, as one would certainly hope it would. Nor do you need an additional Ethernet card to plug into it; the TurboNET board is all-in-one, plugging right into your home network via its on-board Ethernet port.

As it stands, the Series 1 provides no hole through which to get an Ethernet cable out of the box. The solution: a garden-variety hack saw.

Just pop the top [Hack 20] , take a hack saw to the back, and open up a small port that you can sneak a cable through, as shown in Figure That done, fit your the board to the edge connector toward the front of the TiVo and push. You might need to apply a little force, as this is going to be a really tight fit. The TurboNET is a mite smaller. See Figure Finally, plug an Ethernet cable into your new network card, snake it out of your TiVo, and plug it into your wired home network or an Ethernet-to-WiFi bridge the Linksys WET11 works nicely.

Some users optionally mount an Ethernet jack on the outside of their boxes see Figure to clean up the design of their boxes. Just remove the piece of double-stick tape, position the jack, press it to affix the jack to the case, and run a cable from the jack, through your hole, to the network card. Consult the on-screen instructions for the appropriate buttons to press. Your broadband cable modem or DSL router should be providing this functionality to all the other computers in your house.

The TiVo Series 2 comes with online access baked in. While it might be useful to have your TiVo online via another computer [Hack 47] , purists are sure to find it quite frustrating to see a fledgling Linux box not be able to spread its wings. Owners of the Series 2 Standalone TiVo are in luck. TiVo, Inc. Look for it a couple of lines down from the top. Before you can even get to your now-network-enabled TiVo—let alone do anything interesting to it—you need to figure out just where it is on your home network.

All devices on the Net are ultimately accessible by IP address: a set of four numbers providing it with a unique at least in the realm at hand ID. Just as the postman must know the address of your house before being able to deliver your latest Amazon.

As you might expect, given the hackish way in which it was made network-aware, determining the IP address on a Series 1 is a little tricky. Both the hardware and IP addresses above are for my TiVo; your numbers will obviously be different.

Pinging your TiVo or any other computer on the network means sending a small chunk of data and waiting for it to echo the data back. The ping utility is available to just about any computer operating system with a network heartbeat. As long as you see echoed responses e. If nothing comes back, your ping sitting endlessly at PING This is the age of ubiquitous networking, after all.

Using your serial prompt, edit Section 3. There is absolutely no security when telnetting to your TiVo. How does TiVo itself download stuff? Those software updates, for instance. Well, we can. Simply set both to 0. Be sure to specify the URL fully. This means that many domain names actually map to the same IP address, since specifying the host name specified onboard is the only way to tell two requests for two different domains apart.

Take oreilly. Of course, you can still pass files back and forth serially [Hack 36] as a last resort. As more and more web hosting shifts away from the one web server per IP address model, this can be an impediment.

If you desperately must have a tool that can do name resolution for the Series 1, take a look at my wget. The archive is packaged in a similar way. If you point the script at hacks. Hopefully you left your serial port running with Bash, because you are going to use rz [Hack 36]. The program will return you to your prompt immediately, with the server running quietly in the background.

If you are coming in from a command-line FTP program, the start of your session will look something like this:. Anybody can get in, upload, download, and delete files at will. Make sure that your TiVo is behind a pretty strong firewall if you plan to leave FTP running all the time.

That should take it down. If you want to check, issue the ps auxw grep tivoftpd again, and you should no longer see any mention of the tivoftpd process. Upload the nfs-tivo While these instructions should work about the same on Series 1 and 2 TiVos, at the time of this writing there is no NFS module for the Series 2. Setting up security on an NFS mount can be a really tricky thing. This will let the TiVo mount the directory, get files, and put files over the network.

Click OK. There is no graphical tool to set up NFS mounts on Linux. Extract tivotools. Again, 7-Zip will handle this task flawlessly. It is also free.

Hinsdale How-To You should have everything you need now. Let's get our hands dirty! First and foremost, disconnect any drives that you do not need. It is quite possible and easy to wipe out Windows or important data during this process, so it is best not to tempt fate. Follow the Hinsdale How-To.

This is an excellent guide for backing up and restoring the TiVo software to a larger drive. Be sure to test that your new hard drive works in your TiVo before continuing. For DirecTiVo owners, you might want to force a few calls because this is the last chance it will have to update itself.

Allowing a DirecTiVo to call in after it is hacked is not recommended. If you lose your local channels, check out this tip. If you need or want a clean image of the latest TiVo software for your device, consider purchasing an Instant Cake CD from dvrupgrade. This CD has a simple wizard that installs the image on your hard drive.

Unlike Windows, you must mount the hard drive partitions before you can access them. If you followed the Hinsdale How-To, you should be familiar with this, but I will review it. First you need to create new directories which you will use to access the various drives and their partitions. In the example above, we are creating a mnt directory to mount our hard drive partitions.

Then, we create directories for the 4th, 7th, and 9th var partitions on the TiVo drive. Now we need to mount the drives. Don't be too alarmed if you see some messages or warnings. Use the cd and ls -l commands to make sure your drives are configured correctly. If you TiVo has never upgraded itself or you are using a clean image, there may not be anything on hda7. It can be tricky to find and mount the correct serial drive.

If you mount the wrong drive, use the umount command to unmount and try again. Modified files are replaced with the originals. Obviously, you want your hacks to be there whenever the power goes out. Fortunately, there is a program to kill this hdinitrd process called killhdinitrd. Copy the vmlinux. An example follows. It may or may not be the right commands depending on your file names and locations. Follow the on-screen prompts to patch the kernel file. Once that is done, apply the kernels to the two root partitions An upgrade will wipe out your hacks, and it is best to upgrade only when you are prepared to do so.

Enter this command for your TiVo drive:. This tells you which partition the TiVo drive boots from. The TiVo has two root partitions with one being the primary partition. Whenever TiVo downloads and installs a software update, it does so on the alternate partition. If something goes wrong with the software update, the TiVo can still boot up with the other partition.

Clever, huh? In most cases, you will not modify this. These instructions are also available in the killhdinitrd support thread. Note the bootpage commands may not work with some Linux boot CD's.

You will have to issue the commands from a telnet session when we get to that point. TivoTools The TiVo software has very few commands built-in. This where the tivotools file that we downloaded earlier comes in. The first 2 commands create a tivo-bin directory on both boot partitions. If you were not able to mount partition 7 earlier, don't sweat it.

The third and fourth commands will extract the files into the newly created tivo-bin directories. I suppose it is for security reasons or maybe they just don't like us hackers. Of course, we are going to change that. That should take care of the networking filters on both root partitions. If you receive any errors, don't worry. It just means there is an older software version on that partition that doesn't have the filters in place.

If you want to enable DHCP, do not enter the dhclient commands renames the dhclient.