Review: TiVo Hacks by Raffi Krikorian (O'Reilly)

TiVo Hacks is a great collection of one hundred hacks for your TiVo, ranging from quick and easy enhancements such as enabling a thirty second skip, to adding a larger hard drive, and for the more adventurous how to write your own TiVo software. The book is written for a US audience with US TiVo's, however the information also applies to UK Thomson TiVos, and the author does mention them where he knows the details.

I was initially skeptical about the usefulness of such a book as all of the information is freely available on the web, but it's scattered around a multitude of web sites and forum posts. The book draws all of the hacks together in one place, and presents them in a no-nonsense style.

The first chapter starts out with a series of easy hacks that anyone who has just picked up the book can immediately try. Some are more useful than others - the thirty second skip being one of the better ones. This changes TiVo's instant replay button into a thirty second skip. Press it once to jump forward thirty seconds. Press it again for another thirty seconds. This allows you to very easily skip past adverts - which are usually timed to be a multiple of thirty seconds!

On to Chapter two, and increasing the capacity of your TiVo is the next series of hacks. The book has some good pictures to illustrate the inside of TiVo, and what to do. If you're not so computer savvy then this will probably be a godsend, however personally I found the book to be lacking in some of the technical details of upgrades and would still want Hinsdales Guide on hand.

Chapter three explains how to access a Linux shell so that you can run commands on your TiVo. Whilst the hacks in this chapter are not particularly inspiring, they serve as a good primer for some of the hacks that will appear later in the book - teaching you how to edit and copy files on your TiVo. There is even a hack to make your TiVo play MP3's, however the bitrate has to be very low due to TiVo's slow (50Mhz) CPU.

The next two chapters - four and five, explain how to add new interfaces to TiVo, such as a network card. Again there are some good pictures, but the detail here is very lacking - especially for UK owners. As with the hard disc upgrades, the book is a good kick start to the process, but you'll need to search for more in-depth instructions elsewhere. TiVoWeb is covered with some good screenshots to show you what it will look like, as is creating your own channel logos.

Chapter six deals with the thorny subject of video extraction - getting MPEG files off your TiVo in a digital format, and onto your PC (and vice versa). I say "thorny subject" because the topic is banned in the main TiVo Community Forums for legal reasons. This makes getting help and finding information that bit more difficult. The book therefore serves as an invaluable quick reference, with pointers to the utilities you'll need.

The final chapter explains how to write code that runs on your TiVo. The book doesn't teach you how to program, but does contain a useful quick guide to the TCL language, and explains the concepts of TiVo's MFS database, and how to navigate it. If you're a programmer, and/or can write shell scripts, the book contains enough information to give you a good kick start.

Conclusion: TiVo Hacks offers something for everyone (both beginner and intermediate levels), but in doing so sometimes skimps on the detail. There are however plenty of links to further sources of information on the Internet, and to places where utilities can be downloaded. Most of the hacks presented offer something interesting, and made me want to try them out. I'd definitely recommend this book to keep close by as a quick reference.

Contents: