Tivo bliss

Well, in a weekend of both good and bad, one of the highlights was getting my Tivo completely jacked up on steroids. Not only did I boost the recording capacity from a measly 35 hours to a whopping 109 hours, but I also got telnet and ftpd working. But wait there’s more. Tivoweb was also installed. And the icing on the cake was the fact that I successfully extracted a show and created a DVD with menus and everything.

Now all this came at a price though. And the cost was time. It wasn’t like boom bam splat everything is done. It took o good portion of Sunday get the new drive, telnet, ftpd, and Tivoweb wroking. And then I Monday when I started playing around with extraction I ended up losing telnet and ftpd, but Tivoweb continued to work, so it took many hours to get everything back in working condition.

Let me just say this, Tivoweb rocks. It’s by far the best thing short of the Tivo itself. It has SO many features and make general use of the Tivo nicer. Tivoweb requires a network connection on your Tivo, but if you remember, I installed a turbonet card many months ago.

The extraction thing is a long story. From what I found out my Tivo which is really a Directivo scrambles all the recordings, so I needed to install an additional module and run a script so it records in unscrambled mode. Then using a program called TyTools and a service running on the Tivo I am able to copy to my computer an mpg file. Then I run it through a program called DVDlab to create the whole DVD including menus and scene selections. I don’t have a DVD burner yet, but I was able to run it off the hard drive using PowerDVD.

All in all it was a good experience, but I hope I never have to open my Tivo again. And if telent and ftpd continue to work, I never should.