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Hacking the TiVo
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Author: William Von Hagen
List Price: $29.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1592001114
Publisher: Premier Press (August, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 4,140
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Definative resource for the Series 2
This is a great reference for hacking the Series2 TiVo, and the only book out that covers the methods for getting to a command prompt on it. This is significantly more difficult than on the Series1, and it's nice to see a book that covers it.That said, if you have a Series1 then Jeff Kegan's "Hacking TiVo" is probably a better choice.
Rating: 5 out of 5
If you have a series 2...
Then this is the book for you. Covers everything from drive upgrades to Monte, at a good pace (I'm a linux veteran, so I could have done without some of the slower-paced linux introductory stuff, but this book isn't aimed at someone who knows very much about any computer system, which is a good thing). The descriptions and step-by-step are very thorough, for the most part (although I do feel lucky that my tivo had the backdoor code on the same partition listed in the example in the book, or I might have been severely S.O.L. with regard to changing it as described) and the author talks you through in a very light, amenable fashion.The CD itself is extremely valuable, as it is the only one I have so far encountered that contains all the tools I've read are required (or desired :) to fully hack and upgrade your unit. And it couldn't be easier: if you have a Series 2 tivo, hit enter when prompted (you're also covered if you have one of the 2 different kinds of Series 1 tivos :); linux boots up and you're ready to go. The only thing I would have liked from the linux distro--and I realize it needs to cram a lot of stuff on a CD--would have been man pages for the utils included (come on, you can gzip -v9 the man pages and they are super small!), as it would have helped me tremendously to see all the options and commandline switches for mfstools in detail. I was, before reading this book, somewhat hesitant to open my tivo & make it more the way I wanted; now, I can't wait to get a bigger A drive and go for a monte!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Leaves you asking more questions than when you started
Im a big TiVo fan, and was really excited when I started hearing about the whole hacking thing, and was looking forward to the 3 books coming out (this one, the TiVo Hacks book, and the upcoming Hacking TiVo book - which I cant wait to get my hands on.)When I went through this one I was usually left with more questions than answers. The author is a hardcore UNIX guy, and he, unfortunately, expects that you are too. Im certainly not a newbie, but I am not a UNIX administrator either. Many times he gets ahead of himself, and describes a hack that involves doing something he hasnt covered yet, which was really frustrating - having to flip back and forth to try to figure it all out. It is also a little out of date, or just wrong about certain hardware hacks like the TurboNet card for instance, and I was very disappointed that some of the stuff that is supposed to be on the CD isnt there. Having all the software in one place and being able to install it on your TiVo easily is what is really what a good TiVo Cd is about. There are some places on the internet that sell TiVo boot CDs that are better than the one that comes with this book in my opinion. Ill keep looking for the best TiVo hacking book - so should you.
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