I’m exceptionally pleased with myself after finally figuring out how to successfully hack my TiVo, transfer television shows to my Linux box and decrypt the .tivo file format into a friendly MPEG 2 so I can watch it on Linux or any other operating system for that matter.

Basically I point a browser at my TiVo using this address:

https://[YOURTIVOADDRESS]/nowplaying/index.html

You’ll get an authentication prompt where you should enter ‘tivo’ as the user and for the password, enter your Media Access Key (MAK), which you can find if you navigate to your TiVo settings. This will bring you to a page listing everything on your TiVo’s hard drive, with a link to download any of the files. I’ve read that getting them with wget causes problems. Most people recommended using cURL, but I was able to navigate and download the files just using Konqueror. I tried it with Firefox as well, but found that the browser would consistently crash after just a fraction of the way through a download each time I tried.

After transferring a file to my Linux box, I installed this command-line application. After I compiled the program, I tested it out like so:

tivodecode -m [Media Access Key] -o outputfile.mpg sourcefile.tivo

The result worked wonderfully and I am now watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, kicked back in the bedroom with my laptop, running Kubuntu. I’ll be sure and transfer several episodes of Law & Order SVU for the airport wait and flight time when I take a vacation next week. Hot shit.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 11:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.