Mailing List Archive

(Probably OT) TiVo as MythTV box?
I've crossposted this to both mythtv-users and mythtv-dev; I
hope someone will tell me if this is a breach of list-etiquette
without flaming me too heavily.

That said:

As a Canadian, I can't easily get a TiVo-brand STB that is able
to get Canadian guide data. There are some people doing this I'm
told, but they keep a very low profile for various reasons.
Perhaps they use some variation of xmltv. I don't know, and I'm
not asking about that here.

However, the DTiVo does have a hardware MPEG2 DEcoder -- and the
first-generation standalone units even have a hardware MPEG2
ENcoder as well.

Has anyone looked into the possibility of nuking the existing
TiVo Linux OS and replacing it with MythTV? I would think this
would be an interesting project for making use of older TiVo
STBs.

Of course, the restrictive hardware platform (sub-100MHz PPC
processor, 16MB RAM) would make this a challenge, at the very
least.

Even if the 1st-generation TiVo units couldn't be used as
backends due to the restrictive hardware, perhaps they could be
used as frontends somehow?

Just a thought.

--

Shaun Crossley
mailto:shaun@whatever.ca
http://www.whatever.ca
Re: (Probably OT) TiVo as MythTV box? [ In reply to ]
On Saturday 07 June 2003 01:55 pm, Shaun Crossley wrote:
> I've crossposted this to both mythtv-users and mythtv-dev; I
> hope someone will tell me if this is a breach of list-etiquette
> without flaming me too heavily.

It is.

> Has anyone looked into the possibility of nuking the existing
> TiVo Linux OS and replacing it with MythTV? I would think this
> would be an interesting project for making use of older TiVo
> STBs.
>
> Of course, the restrictive hardware platform (sub-100MHz PPC
> processor, 16MB RAM) would make this a challenge, at the very
> least.

The total lack of drivers and documentation for the mpeg chips make it much
more than just a 'challenge'. Realistically, it's not going to happen.

Isaac