Daily Archives: October 16, 2003

bq.The operator of a Web forum devoted to and sponsored by digital video recorder maker TiVo has asked people to stop posting information about how to copy video off the device onto another machine, fearing he could be held liable for violating a controversial digital copyright law. – Lisa M. Bowman
bq.Video extraction on the TiVo is now almost impossible. There is a program out there to enable extraction in the old series 1 devices, but it does require some serious hacking involving scripts on the TiVo and a hacked ethernet connection. With the series 2 box, they’ve encrypted the stored movies and made shell access to the device difficult, so the box is essentially locked up. The series 2 TiVo is now essentially a VCR with a giant blank tape that you can record anyting you want to, but you can never eject the tape. – Matt Haughey
bq.Yes, I cover video extraction (and insertion), for Series1 standalones only. Series1 DirecTiVos scramble video by default, and though there is a simple hack out there to disable this scrambling, I’m prohibited legally from talking about it in the book. I don’t cover Series2 extraction either. – Jeff Keegan
bq.Tivo already takes a lot of heat from the networks who think of all Tivo users as commercial-skipping thieves. If Tivo supported (directly or indirectly) extraction of video for burning to DVDs, the networks would think that Tivo and all Tivo users are nothing but thieves and they’d hassle Tivo half to death. – Jerry L Bell
bq.Record your favorite shows onto long-lasting DVDs and take them along for the ride. – DVD recorders with TiVo I think most of you know that I am a longtime TiVo supporter. All I want to do is occasionally back something up that I want to watch but haven’t gotten around to yet and probably won’t for a while. It seems somehow unfair to me that the answer is to spend an extra $1000 dollars.