I realized that I haven’t done any documenting on my blog about how I hacked my TiVo, because this all happened before I had this blog. Not sure if I’m keen on trying to remember and document all the details of what I did, but I can tell you this: 99% of what I did was based on knowledge that I got out of this excellent book:
I’m sure that you could get all the knowledge that’s in this book by reading the Dealdatabase forums, but this would be a highly frustrating, time-wasting experience. Forums are just not a good way to collect this sort of stuff – you end up with zillions of disjointed threads and random scraps of information and lots of outdated stuff (e.g.: Sleeper ISO) that will lead you to dead-ends if you are not careful. The book also came with a very nice bootable CD that had lots of really useful software so I didn’t need to waste time searching for, downloading, and burning all of the stuff to a CD.
I compared this book to:
and there was no contest. The O’Reilly book is outdated and has tons of stuff that is Series 1 only. It doesn’t cover the truly interesting things for Series 2, such as doing a “kernel monte”, enabling the HMO, enabling a bash prompt, mfs_ftp, TyStudio, etc… Von Hagen covers all of this stuff and has step by step instructions that made it really easy.
If you want to hack a TiVo Series 2, you should definitely consider getting this book.