Hello fellow TiVo travelers,
Decided I couldn’t stand anymore 2 minute long FTA commercials and investigated several options. While researching Freevo, SageTV, BeyondTV, and various hardware PVRs (Topfield, Strong – DTVforum) I stumbled across the ozTiVo TWiki site. Having relatives still living in the old country figured I’d hunt up a Series 1 and decided to give TiVo a go.
First I need to thank all of the contributors to the ozTiVo TWiki, those responsible for doing the hacks, integrating software and building the ISO images. Great job! Also thanks to all those working had behind the scenes keeping the guide data updated, it is very much appreciated. A special thanks to Darren for taking his time to answer a hundred stupid questions during a long phone call and for answering his e-mail.
So I got a, actually two, “Renewed” Philips HDR31299 Series 1 TiVo’s. “Renewed in USA to original, Product warranty quality assured, To customer specifications” – looks like that means – new manuals, includes a product warranty card (..), new remote with batteries, new cables (looks like a full set), the top/cover is either new or re-sprayed (not a scratch), inside is clean and void of any dust, power supply looks to be new and the disk is a single 30Gb (the original machine appears to have been a HDR312 that had two 15Gb drives) with a sticker on it that says “Philips Reprogramed, Quad Test ok, Programming ok, on 04/04/02. Here are some photos:
http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c37/maashbolt/TiVo/
This being a proof-of-concept machine I wanted to keep costs down. If it was possible I didn’t want to buy a Turbonet card or install a PAL/Australian tuner until the “supreme allied commander of the southern hemisphere” (aka she who must be obeyed) saw, was pleased and gave TiVo the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. I have a VCR that I’m using as TV source and I had a spare, new, 80Gb Hitachi Deskstar floating around so used it for now.
I’m happy to say, even me a LinNix illiterate, has the OzTiVo working like a charm!
First experience (experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want..), I couldn’t get dial-up through my ISP to work. I know I was warned, but thought I’d mention it. I ended up using a serial PPP connection through XP.
Second experience, got the hardware firewall sorted, but for some yet to be determined reason couldn’t get Sygate (software firewall) to play. So ATM for each program call I disable Sygate. I'll post when I figure it out. In addition now that an XP machine has a directly connected machine (the TiVo), I'm now seeing multicast IP packets from at first explorer.exe and now other applications.
Third experience, after the second guided setup call, after waiting the 4 hours and for System Information to indicate all had finished, and after re-boot into normal mode (made sure I wasn’t in maintenance mode) – date and time was incorrect. I remember the date was one day behind and that the time wasn’t a full 24 hours out, but don’t know the exact delta time difference. I telneted to the TiVo and set the date and time.
Fourth experience, couldn’t get the Tivoweb on the ISO image to work. Tried the echo trick, looked around, ps ax didn’t list it and given my limited linux knowledge I just gave up.. Downloaded TivowebPlus, installed it, started it and that works just fine. Given my VI/Joe knowledge is zero haven’t tried to edit the .author config file so after I re-boot I have to telnet and restart Tivowebplus.
That’s it! Pretty darn good IMHO!
Thanks again for all the excellent work by all involved in the ozTiVo project.
Cheers,
Phred
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks