Our Tivo

In December of 2003 we bought a Tivo Video Recorder. I had read on Slashdot about how people were modifying their with extended capacity, network connections, and DVD burning. I figured that since I can't stand commercials (thanks mom) and I have kind of unique TV watching tastes I should give it a go. I had also just finished my student teaching, and I figured this would be sort of a present for myself.

I ended up ordering a refurbished Phillips HDR-212 from Poweron.com for $99.

I also ordered a Network card from 9thTee.com for $69.

Finally I looked in the local circulars for cheap 120gig hard drives. Since it was the holiday shopping season it wasn't hard to find them for 1/2 price with the mail-in rebates. I went to Office Max for these.

Once everything arrived I laid out all the parts and got familiar with what was what.

Then I downloaded and printed out the wonderful upgrade instructions from Hinsdale's How-To.

I'm slightly familiar with Linux, so the procedure wasn't all that difficult. Even someone who wasn't familiar with Linux could likely figure it out.

After I had upgraded the capacity from 20 hours to 306 hours I followed the instruction on installing the network card. Next thing you know, I was able to fool with my Tivo from my computer....cool!

Finally, I added the extraction files and programs (Tytool 8r4p1) to my Tivo from the DealDatabase site. This worked out smoothly as well. I was able to pull shows off my Tivo and save them to my hard drive for archiving. I do this with shows I might be able to use for my students i.e history stuff, writer biographies, and all those interesting things on Modern Marvels and Frontline. Occasionally I'll even archive something about music...maybe Phish or some other band I enjoy.

My last problem was getting the files to be DVD compliant and having cool menu's for the DVD's. Our DVD player is very picky and wanted things to follow spec. That took quite a while and required lots of trips to DealDatabase for tips. If you don't want cool menus and have a DVD player that's not as picky as ours, then the included TYtool extraction program will make basic boring menus that work.

Tivo has changed the way I watch TV. I still prefer to read, listen to music and surf the web, but now when I do watch TV it's something I want to see. I haven't seen a commercial since December 14th, 2003 !!!

Zach