Bill von Hagen's "Hacking the TiVo" Page

Hate the Background color? Pick Another:

My Hacking the TiVo book was released August 13, 2003. The second edition was released in August, 2004. TiVos are great machines, and this was a fun book to do. TiVo hackers extraordinaire musclenerd and embeem did the technical editing for the 2nd and 1st editions, respectively, and were a tremendous help - I can't thank them enough. There are some typos, but they're all my fault. Send me mail if you have comments!

This page contains corrections, software that I somehow left off the CD, and other useful TiVo tidbits. If you find a problem in the book or think of anything that should be here, please let me know.

NOTE: Because the 2nd edition is now out and the CD in that edition is substantially better and more up-to-date than the one in the 1st, you can download the ISO for the CD from the 1st book by clicking here. It's 200+ MB, so don't do this casually. As I said in the book, most of the software on this CD is the work of true TiVo hackers from the community. They deserve the lion's share of the credit for this CD - I primarily just put it all together and organized things. Their names are listed in the front matter of each edition of the book and also where each bit of software is discussed.

DirecTiVo Hacking

As I said in the book, I'm primarily a standalone TiVo user and have limited experience with DirecTiVo,s especially Series2 DirecTiVo's. A reader was kind enough to send me a summary of using the second edition of my book and his own research to get USB networking up and running on a DirecTiVo 7000, and allowed me to post this on my site. Click here for details. Thanks a million, Rob!

Errata for the Second Edition

• General Tip: Ed Alley points out that if you are using the dd command to copy a disk due to disk errors (conv=noerror,sync), using a smaller buffer size of 512 bytes is preferable to using the suggested byte size of 32k. If you encounter a read error, dd will discard the buffer, so using a very small buffer size in this case will increase the chances that you'll be able to use the cloned disk. Wish I'd thought of that! Thanks, Ed.
• Page 39: There should be a space between the backup and -o arguments in the command example mfstool backup-o. Thanks to bk67110 at softhome.net for this one.
• Page 169 - BATBD Description - Ironically, the discussion of available boot options on the CD is wrong. That should teach me to expand the contents of the CD at the last minute, but my intentions were good ;-) There are actually 5 boot options for the CD in the 2nd edition of the book:

  
  bigs2    Series 2 and Large Disk/File Support (Same as pressing <enter>)
  bigs1    Series 1 and Large File Support (Byteswapping Enabled on b,c,d)
  custs1   Series 1 and Large Disk/File Support (Specify custom swapped drives)
  s1swap   Series 1 Support with byteswapping enabled. (TiVo Partition Support)
  s1std    Series 1 Support without byteswapping, with DMA. (Backups)
  
  

• Page 418 - Discussion of cpio options - cpio's i option is lower case, not upper-case, as is shown in the bullet list.
• Page 458 - Table for Disabling Encryption - The commands given in the third column must all be typed on a single line. The table in the book wraps the commands across two lines due to production limitations.
• Page 474 - Example of mfs_ftp output - In the file listing at the top of the page, file names are broken across multiple lines, which is not correct. If your xterm or terminal window is wide enough, the file names will each appear on their own line.

Errata for the First Edition

• Do not use the MFS Tools restore command's -s256 option, which creates a 256 MB swap partition. A bug in MFS tools prevents the swap partition from being initialized correctly. Use -s127 instead, which will create a 128MB swap partition and correctly initialize it. You can create a 256MB boot partition if you initialize it on the TiVo (when connected via a serial or network connection) by using /bin/mkswap, but you'll be booting without swap, which can be dicey if your system needs to reindex or fsck - I'd avoid doing so, for now ;-)

• A kind reader pointed out that the BATBD CD that accompanies the book does not include the smbfs module and apps for Series 2 TiVos. Sorry! Some people had problems finding the kernel modules in general, so here is some more detailed information. The SMB and NFS kernel modules are located in system-specific subdirectories of the kernel_modules directory at the root of the BATBD CD - you have to mount the CD in order to access this directory. However, the S2 SMB module and apps are still missing. To retrieve a gzipped tar file that contains this kernel module and associated applications, click here.

I have not had any other specific reports of missing software from the CDs in the book. If you're aware of anything else that is missing, let me know ASAP via email and I'll post it here.

Thanks for buying the book! I hope that it was useful to you.