Any TIVO experts out there?............

[CrownPrinceBandar]

I have a series 1 on TIVO sitting at my folks house gathering dust. I have gone on the internets and found plenty of resources, but I have been having trouble finding the info I need on any of the TIVO pages. So, I was wondering if any TIVO-savvy gurus could answer the following questions for me:

1) What format does TIVO record in? mpeg? mp4? I have almost the entire first season of SciFi's Battlestar Galactica stored on my TIVO's HD and I would desperately love to archive them to DVD. But how to do that? Hmmm...

2) Has anyone had any success in upgrading/hacking their series 1? I have seen sites like weaknees.com that offer upgrades. And just how easy/painless was it?

3) Finally, how would/could one link up an external DVD burner to a TIVO, since my series 1 doesn't have USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394? I'm assuming there is a hack out there that would aid in this process.

Thanks in advance.

[FormerDittoHead]

1. I can tell you about Series II players (maybe overlap?)

1) video format is a proprietory format :-( - not standard Mpeg. You may want to check out http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/tivoextraction.html

2) I have successfully added a 160GB hard drive to my series II 40 gb model. I bought a NON-transferable lifetime Tivo subscription $300, which has now paid for itself over the month to month fee). But if I messed up my Tivo's install, and it couldn't have been repaired (NON-warranty, of course), I'd lose the subscription as well. Point is that I was on pins and needles during the upgrade, for fear of messing things up.

The directions are NOT drop dead easy - perhaps to one who has already hacked a TiVo before, reminds me of linux man files - they sure make sense if you already understand it! There were overlapping instructions (if you have this kind of Tivo, do THIS, otherwise do THAT) and questions which were only answered by reading the thing completely backwards and forwards like 20 times. The instructions, of course, make PERFECT sense ONCE YOU'RE DONE. Piercing the virgin experience was less than comfortable.

3) Short of completely hacking out your TiVo (and there are websites which discuss this like http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/ ) I would suggest you getting a cheap PC, check out one of those *MPEG* Haugpauge video cards (down to $60 now - not a simple TV capture card, it encodes mpeg realtime) and using: http://www.mythtv.org/

edited for technical info