How can I help?

[worm]

Hiya

Happy to help in any way I can. Not sure what that would be, but there you go. I'm in no way professional, but been hacking around for nearly 30 years in various ways, mostly PHP and Perl these days.

In particular, I've done some work in grabbing data from RadioTimes (xmltv data) and bleb.org to produce listings for various purposes, so I can hit the ground running to a degree.

[GaryTheGolfer]

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure that my "skills" will be of any great use but here goes:

Tivo (upgraded HD) Lifetime sub.
PC literate (from CP/M-DOS-All flavours of Windows); Built my first PC (well Apple clone in Hongkong in '83); Built my last PC 2 months ago.
Limited knowledge of Linux (general playtime/curiosity & enough to upgrade Tivo HD)
Little bit of Visual Basic programme development (Excel automation)
Little bit of JTagging.
Satellite feedhunting
Dreambox image flashing/DreamBoxEdit

Like I said, nothing in this arena really.

Willing to learn, encourage or help test though.

[SolidTechie]

Hi Guys

Several years of Windows Server Support
Bit of DBA support - Oracle; SQL
Bit of VBA
Knowledge of NAT/DNS/ISA

S1 TiVo with Cachecard, twin 120GB disks & all the usual hacks.

Passion

But I already see that you have all of that in spades, so perhaps more useful:

I have a "backup" TiVo available for testing/breaking - it's apparently got a sound problem, I've never tried it.

I have access to a BNIB Tivo - yes, persuaded my Mate to buy one - he hasn't yet got around to plugging it in! (he's a habitual "mover")

I have web space available - I have a multi hosting package, so a fair bit of space/bandwith, with a couple of "spare" domains already set up. I can offer ftp, webmail, forums, php, MySQL, ruby, perl, cgi, etc etc. - pretty much, you name it, I can do it.

Please let me know what I can do to help

[Tcm2007]

I wrote a number of the TiVo hacks including EndPad and the original DailyMail. Zenith of hacking was getting my two TiVos to share the load of recording by scheduling conflicts on each other, then displaying a combined networked Now Playing and playing back recordings regardless of which TiVo they were actually on. I think about two people managed to make it work, and it was such an effort I gave up and bought a Media Center wherevthat's built in!

Can't easily contribute as don't have a working TiVo/STB/TV combo.

But if my rusty knowledge of MFS structures and TCL can help I'll try to look at code & stuff.

[bigflyer]

I'm a programmer (not done much TiVo hacking though) knowing C++, PHP etc.

I also have a couple of servers hosted in a data centre which could be used for data servers for testing.

Also, I have a couple of TiVos, one running (so I'm relatively unwilling to experiment with that at an early stage) but I have another which I had got 'just in case' my first one broke, so that could be messed with.


In response to what someone asked about fees. I'd happily pay £10-£20 a year (possibly more) for an EPG service. A basic dedicated hosted server costs around £2000 a year, so if a couple of hundred people were willing to pay £10 a year, that would cover the cost of having a properly hosted server that could easily serve several thousand TiVos.

[bryl]

'Joe public' non techie with unmodded Series 1 running on
soon-to-die 'life sub'.

I have little technical to offer, but if anyone can make use of my 'spare' 40 gb orginal tivo drive in this venture give me a shout.

[healeydave]

Just a random selection of the rapid comments coming in and in no particular order, you guys might want to head on over to the WIP sub-forum and start conversing with Stephen (Kitschcamppalace) and Stuart (TCM2007), these guys have a good understanding on the logistics of getting this up and running.

That goes for anyone who has time and skills like PHP, TCL Scripting, Perl, SQL etc.

...hacking around for nearly 30 years in various ways, mostly PHP and Perl these days.

In particular, I've done some work in grabbing data from RadioTimes (xmltv data) and bleb.org to produce listings for various purposes, so I can hit the ground running to a degree.

...Used to earn my daily crust as a programmer in the Unix world, so C and related languages, shell scripting, grep, awk and that sort of thing.

...I also many years ago got the TivoCanada instructions for what they were going......Have a bit of experience loading slices once they are geenrated using CRON and various pitfalls (including making sure clock is not skew).

[wanye]

hiya,

not sure what i can do to help, but am willing to do what i can.

tivo with turbonet and upgraded disk. been a while since i used it though.

completely at ease on a command line, i'm a UNIX/Oracle DBA by trade, and run several linux servers/websites. knowledge of php/mysql is average. i know enough to get by hacking around with other people's code.

[regatta]

I am a computer engineer by trade, so quite happy fitting disks, turbonet/cachecards and the like. Also not afraid to tinker at the command prompt with some decent instructions! The drawback (or benefit?) is that I live in Alicante, Spain. So, if there are any ex-pats over here, that need assistance with whatever the solution to our TiVo problem is, count me in guys.

I also have a pronto, so am happy to capture any obscure satellite box IR codes needed over here.

Many thanks to all you clever techy guys, we all have our fingers crossed.

Regards, Neal Walker

[poppadum]

Single TiVo with cachecard and 250GB disk with the usual hacks installed; much loved by the family so not sure I'll be too popular if I keep taking it down for testing but I'll do my best.

I'm at home on the command line, reasonably confident with php/sql, OKish with perl but not tcl

[tje]

So where do we go from here guys?
I've servery stuff ready to go whenever we think we might need it.
Dave - the forum is getting a little slow with the recent spurt in activity

[spitfires]

I've catalogued what everyone is offering for as and when we need it

I guess all the techies should head over to the Work in Progress forum http://www.tivoland.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9


(p.s. the forum is a bit slow at times - usually when Dave is surfing I think! - just wait a minute and it catches up )

[healeydave]

Yeah, I bought everything in-house when things in the tivo world slowed down, I'm gonna push the forum back out to external host where there should be better bandwidth soon, bear with me for the time being.

[swuk]

I wrote a number of the TiVo hacks including EndPad

I for one owe you many many beers for that thing. Absolutely brilliant utility.

For my part, I'm a cross-platform developer, but mostly UNIX/Linux, using C, C++ and Java. I've done a lot of comms stuff both client and server, XML parsing/creation with libxml, Java servlets hooking into backend databases etc.

I've only 1 Tivo, which I use all the time, so can't tinker with it too much.

[Brother52]

Electronic engineer (principally digital), 20+ years of various ASM, embedded/x86 C(++), Python, etc.