Why are so many hacks DTiVo only?

[thinksnow]

Tooling around, attempting refined searches, I’ve noticed that so many of the hacks demonstrated around here are DTiVo only, it seems: xPlusz and 2.5Extreme being the biggies I was looking at.

Is there a particular reason for this? Is the DT code that much different from the for a SA unit?

[Adolf Bottler]

Originally posted by thinksnow
Tooling around, attempting refined searches, I’ve noticed that so many of the hacks demonstrated around here are DTiVo only, it seems: xPlusz and 2.5Extreme being the biggies I was looking at.

Is there a particular reason for this? Is the DT code that much different from the for a SA unit?

Yes, there are significant differences.

Given that many of the people who developed those hacks were/are DTV users, the hacks were developed for combo boxes because a DTiVo is far superior to an SA+DTV setup.

[Silverdude]

There are many places that deal the the SA tivo, and the amount of hacks are staggering. Lots of them deal with downloading guides from the internet and scripting them to match local TV stations.

SD

[thinksnow]

Silverdude , Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter....

I suspect I shall have a bit more searching ahead. Thank you.

[onyx00]

I believe it's the nature of the DTV users; many of them hack the DTivo because they "test" the DTV service; it's a natural transition.

[mrblack51]

specifically citing the two tools you mentioned:

25xtreme - the big reason this was put together was because you have to flash the prom when you hack a dtivo. an sa doesnt require this. therefore, a regular backup of a sa which contains hacks could be shared by many

xplusz - should work fine on an sa. of course, certian functions wouldnt be applicable

and a few you didnt mention:

noscramble - not necessary on s1 sa units, since they dont use scrambling. s2 sa units didnt need it till 4.0, and now there is a noscramble for that.

noppv, mvchannels - not really applicable based on how the sa works. they are only really useful because the dtivo has the integrated dtv receiver functionality

as has been mentioned, pretty much every tool out there will work on an sa, unless there were specific features of the dtivo that it was harnessing (as mentioned above). the extraction stuff, tivoweb, and numerous other utilities work on both sa and dtivo

[thinksnow]

Thanks for the input, folks, and especially for the run-down, mrblack. I just found the wording specificially stating that some hacks (i.e., the two I mentioned earlier) were DTivo only, and not for SA, a bit off-putting.

So yeah, thanks again.