Word: tivos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like many other couch potatoes who take their quality TV time seriously, I hailed the arrival of TiVo as a liberator. Back in the dark ages of TV watching - about four years ago - there were two ways to catch your favorite shows. You could run your life on the networks' schedule, or you could enter VCR-programming hell. Then came TiVo, a miraculous device that remembered what I liked and let me watch it whenever I wanted. But, as I soon learned, TiVo could be tyrannical...
...problem occurred when the machine ran out of room on its puny 30-gigabyte hard drive (space enough for about 10 hours of TV at best quality). Loath to delete or miss anything TiVo had saved especially for me - who wants to disappoint a machine that has worked so hard?--I lost a lot of sleep watching things I wasn't quite in the mood for. Take the night I stayed up bleary-eyed through the three-hour Russian version of Solaris just so TiVo could cram the next day's Simpsons and West Wing onto its NOW PLAYING list...
...Luckily for me, there is a whole subculture of TiVo users who squeeze better performance out of their boxes by hacking into them. Two how-to books on the topic will be published in August (TiVo Hacks, O'Reilly; Hacking the TiVo, Premier Press). There's also a step-by-step guide at tivofaq.com/hack. Or you can do what I did: install a ready-made upgrade from WeaKnees.com. All hacking will, of course, void your warranty. But what you get in return is a supercharged TiVo with three or more times the recording capacity. The larger the hard drive...
...With TiVo, the hacking process is simpler than you might think. This is because TiVo is not so much a stereo component as a computer that runs on the free operating system called Linux. It uses IDE hard drives that you can purchase at any computer store for about a dollar per gigabyte. You need to hook up the hard drive to your PC or Mac, install a free piece of software called BlessTivo, open the TiVo box and attach its new brain. (Reverse the process, and you can make a backup of precious TV recordings on your computer.) Most...
...save your favorite programs, you plug the recorder directly into your television, cable box or TiVo player. The Archos AV120 ($460) stores about 20 gigabytes of data. That's enough to record Hitchcock's Marnie and still have room for more. While the screen measures less than 2 in. diagonally, the picture is surprisingly vivid...