Quote Originally Posted by roman View Post
Looking at these Freeview boxes:-
You don't specify in your profile where you are located. If you are in the UK then those "Freeview" boxes will be OK. However if you are not in the UK please be advised that "Freeview" UK is not the same as "Freeview" in Australia. For starters UK uses UHF band only so these boxes won't have the ability to tune into VHF stations that the majority of Australian capital cities are on.

So what I'm visualising is removing the existing analogue tuner and being able to replace it with a tuner and compact decoder that can then be connected into the Tivo motherboard (with wires so we don't have to worry too much about dimensions). If its done right the Tivo would be able to switch channels directly (not via infra-red) and the decoded output would be fed directly onto the motherboard. And with a bit of luck it would pick-up its power off the motherboard too.
It's been done already. Some people successfully used a compact digital STB made by Thompson a while ago and either fed the video out of that into the rear video input socket or even got adventurous and removed the existing tuner module and fed the video into this point. Control was still via IR but I am a little confused as to your proposal because your method would still need an IR signal to switch channels (the boxes you list all still need IR for channel change) or at the very least some kind of translator to convert the TiVo I2C tuner control signals to something your digital tuner can understand.

(with simplified firmware as the EPG, etc would be redundant)
Why? The whole reason people like TiVo is for it's EPG. To remove the EPG makes a TiVo no better off than a sub-$200 single tuner STB with hard disk.

You also do realise that what you are propsing still is essentially connecting up an external digital STB but somehow you want to control the channel switching via the TiVo I2C bus signals rather than the IR Blaster?

It will still be an analogue video output from the digital decoder that is again digitized into SD only MPEG for recording on the hard disk. It is still only a single tuner and the ability to record one video stream.

Also can a Tivo still work OK with the tuner removed?
Sure can.