TiVo surfing sans subscription

[knifeyspoony]

I want to buy a TiVo. I don't want to pay the subscription fees or be forced to download updates, but I still want to be able to schedule recordings from an onscreen guide. So I think I want to hack a Series2 to pull down guide data from a cost-free source, altogether obviating daily calls-in. Can it be done?

[pcompact]

I've done it for a Series 1. There are non-trivial
obstacles to getting access to shell, etc on Series2.
I have to say that the listing data I produced was inferior to the Tivo distributed stuff, and a pain in the butt to do.

Pcompact

[knifeyspoony]

Thanks. So it is possible. Can you give me the gist of how you did it?

[pcompact]

I found a suite of perl programs by
Grant Hollingworth
called Tivoguide-1.3.2 that used to work
for me. However, the source of the info,
www.zap2it.com has changed its format
and the scripts no longer work. I'm sure
that if you want to spend enough time on
it, you could fix it..

There is another project called XmlTV which
will produce listings in xml or html format..
I found it to be slower than tivoguides scripts,
and it doesn't come out of the box ready to
produce the "slices" needed to program the
TiVo.

The Canadian group and the Australian group
haved worked on these ideas, since they don't have access to the Tivo serve.

People have a reluctance to discuss this topic
for two reasons:

1) It's confused with theft of service ( it is NOT!)

2) Apparently TiVo loses money on each TiVo sold and has to depend on people getting
and paying for TiVo subscriptions to stay afloat.
I.e. enough people don't subscribe, then TiVo goes broke, and people like me with lifetime
subscriptions to the service are very unhappy.

I don't find the second argument convincing in the
case of someone hacking an old Series 1.

[knifeyspoony]

There's a quite thorough guide at Tivo Canada (http://www.tivocanada.com). But as that site mentions as well, TiVo's business model does rely on subscription fees.