TiVo Hacks by Raffi Krikorian

In my impa­tience for TiVo To Go, I recent­ly bought TiVo Hacks by Raf­fi Kriko­ri­aned­st­ly use­ful hacks, like pret­ty much all of the books in the O’Reil­ly ____ Hacks series. I say most­ly… who wants to make all of the text on your TiVo inter­face in ital­ics (seri­ous­ly, hack no. 9).

I’d say that of all the books out there for hack­ing your TiVo, this is prob­a­bly the most con­cise and up-to-date. Of course, there’s part of the prob­lem. If you have Series 2 TiVo, you trade off for nicer fea­tures with the inabil­i­ty to do many of the more pop­u­lar hacks for the TiVo. You can’t use FTP to get your video off of your TiVo with a Series 2 becuase the video is scram­bled on it. Okay, you can FTP it, but what’s the point? Any­way, none of this is the author’s fault, and he goes iin­to some detail to explain exact­ly what mod­els can do what.

The great­est hack, in my opin­ion, for any TiVo is going to be adding more hard dri­ve space. You’re real­ly not going to improve on the fea­tures of the UI by adding a screen clock and the whole web-surf­ing thing sounds fun until you remem­ber that surf­ing with just a TiVo remote is going to suck (that’s why you have a lap­top). Adding/replacing hard disks is the killer hack, and this book tells you pret­ty much all you need to know. Of course, all you may need to know is to just buy a kit from Bill Reg­n­ery. How­ev­er, this book still goes a long way and I’d rec­om­mend it to any­one who owns a TiVo and is curi­ous about what’s inside the box and how to make it do some cool tricks.

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By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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