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85%
PROS
Easy to read, tons of great tips, helpful tip organization, detailed and very in depth.
LOWS
Unless you are ready to void your warranty, there is not much here for you.
OVERALL
An excellent guide on how to make the most out of our TiVo, providing that you are willing to open up your box and void the warranty.
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So you have got yourself a brand new TiVo, and you love the way it has revolutionized your TV watching experience. You can record all of your favorite programs with ease, fly through commercials, pause any time you want, and go back to see that dunk one more time. Life couldn't be better. But, you had to interfere with the perfect course of TiVo. You, being the avid computer geek determined there are ways around the user-friendly TiVo interface. You want to get under the skin of TiVo… manipulate it to your full advantage and learn just how powerful it can really be. You are a naughty little geek. If you have decided that you cannot deny your feelings to explore and hack into your precious TiVo box, you have come to the right review. Today we are going to talk about TiVo Hacks, another set of 100 tips and tricks straight from O'Reilly to help you get to know your TiVo a bit better.
Written by Raffi Krikorian, TiVo Hacks is an easy to pick up guide about all of the different ways to toy around with your TiVo to make it do exactly what you want (even though it already does that for the most part…). The book is divided into different hacks, and then separated into chapters based upon their functions. You can read the book in any which way you like: going from cover to cover, picking different chapters, or just picking different hacks scattered all over the book.
The one aspect of this book that separates it from the other Hacks books in the O'Reilly series is that there is huge difference between hacks branded beginner and hacks branded expert. The thing about TiVo Hacks is that you are dealing with a physical unit. Most of them are not plain software type hacks like in an operating system. In order to really use this book (and your TiVo) to its full potential, you are going to need to open the TiVo, voiding your warranty. This can be a big choice for some people, especially when the TiVo is shared with your family. If you wish to take the chance of voiding your warranty, opening your TiVo will allow you to fully customize every aspect about your device. If you would like to leave that nice sticker alone, you can read some of the book's remote hacks to fiddle around with. The point is that unless you are willing to open up your TiVo, you may not be able to appreciate its capabilities.
I hope I didn't totally turn off any of you more conserved users. But if you are too nervous to void your warranty, there are still a bunch of tricks you can try. The first chapter is dedicated to these types of hacks. Even though they are rather low key and trivial, they can perform a few useful functions. Remote hacks are done by pressing a simple set of keys into the remote in succession. An example of this is enabling the onscreen clock.
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To do this, simply press select, play, select, 9, select in succession. This will enable a small clock at the bottom of the screen whenever you are using TiVo. Remote hacks can simply be disabled by either re-doing the code or sometimes by resetting the unit. Other examples of remote hacks include making the play bar disappear faster and activating a log to see exactly what TiVo is doing.
The last set of hacks in this chapter need to have something called the “backdoor” enabled in order for them to work. The backdoor is just a mode that you need to enable in TiVo so these special remote control codes will be activated. The thing is that if you have a later version of the TiVo firmware, it will be harder to enable the backdoor mode. Earlier versions can simply enter a specific code in the Search function of TiVo to enable the backdoor. For version 3.1 or later, you will need to download a free program from Source Forge, put it on a floppy, run Kazymyr's bootdisk program (explained in the book) and have the TiVo hard drive connected. The book walks through how to accomplish this, but if you have a later version of TiVo, it can be a hassle. These hacks allow you to do things like italicizing everything, making the fast forward function work faster, viewing TiVo showcased programs, and enabling advanced wish lists. If you have an earlier version of TiVo (3.0 or below) enabling the back door will be no problem. For later versions, it will require more work.
