Taking control of a TiVo...

[mithriltabby]

So just about the time my 11-year-old VCR started eating tapes, TiVo announced a discount on the Humax DVR, which allows burning shows to DVD-R and DVD-RW. I decided it was finally time to take advantage of the Series 2 technology.

One thing you get with Series 2 is USB ports. This means that you can plug in a USB network interface and hook the thing up to your home LAN. However, one thing they don’t mention at the time on the canonical list of network adapters that work with a TiVo is that they only work with the Linksys USB200M Version 1— and the Version 2 was the only officially approved one they were selling at Fry’s, even on the so-new-you-have-to-ask-for-it 7.2 update. Humax technical support didn’t know about this and referred me to their level 2 tech support, and when I eventually got through to them they referred me to TiVo’s support, and they knew about the problem; they’ve finally updated the web site. Fortunately, the list of all wired adapters known to work with TiVo listed the Netgear FA120, which works just fine.

Next, it was time to take advantage of the Series 2 functionality and the Home Media Engine. A little hunting showed Galleon to be the most feature-rich project: it can supply MP3 music, download videocasts, check the weather, and move videos back and forth between your computer’s hard drive and the TiVo. The project is primarily written for Windows machines, but it’ll run anywhere you can run J2SE.

Java complained about not recognizing the SSL certificate on my TiVo box. On Linux, extracting it was just a matter of running openssl and telling it s_client -connect 10.0.0.6:443, saving the certificate to tivo.cert, then going to /usr/java/jdk1.5.0/jre/lib/security and running /usr/java/jdk1.5.0/jre/bin/keytool -keystore cacerts -import -file /home/max/Projects/galleon/tivo.cert.

Converting videos between different formats on Linux can be a headache, but there’s a nifty program called tovid that can run all the different programs at FreshRPMs to churn out the MPEG-2 format that TiVo likes. The -svcd option looks excellent when converting DivX to MPEG-2.

So I’ve been able to free up the slots of the VCR and the DVD player from my entertainment center’s stack. Galleon will happily supply MP3 files to the TiVo (and can handle playlists of various sorts, including ones from iTunes) but given that the TiVo has a tendency to crash after about 20 minutes of that, I can’t retire my aging CD changer just yet.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

Example use: downloaded the first of the ACLU Freedom Files, converted it from QuickTime to MPEG2, and watched it on my TV from the comfort of my own sofa.

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

It's such a shame that you live so far from us. I'd ask you over to hook our system up.

[mithriltabby]

See if you can install VNC on your system; I could try helping out remotely.

[tronpublic.livejournal.com]

Of course...
Of course...
A child could do it!

[mithriltabby]

Only if they were comfortable reading Java source code.

[tronpublic.livejournal.com]

...or you could get one of these to help out:

http://thecia.com.au/star-trek/original-series/3/01a2.jpg

TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection

[tronpublic.livejournal.com]

Don't know if this applies to your unit:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/14/1440252&from=rss

Re: TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection

[mithriltabby]

It hasn’t hit me yet, but I’m planning to build a MythTV box that doesn’t have that limitation. TiVo say it’s actually a bug that anyone is seeing that on anything other than Pay-Per-View. However, if the MPAA manages to put sufficient pressure on TiVo to actually interfere in my use of the box, I want to have an alternative...

Re: TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

MythTV and FreeVo are perhaps the best, and only, ways to avoid it since it is part of the MacroVision license requirements - and just about every VCR, DVR, DVD Recorder, etc, has a MacroVision license. It isn't just TiVo.

Aside from that, you might check out tivolovers, and the community info page, it is full of resource links.