Hacking the TiVo (2nd ed)

The TiVo is the world's most popular Digital Video Recorder, enabling users to record and display television and cable broadcasts much like a Video Cassette Recorder, but saving recordings to hard drives rather than to videotape.

TiVos are actually computer systems running dedicated applications under the Linux operating systems. Because they are computer systems, their recording capacity can be upgraded by adding additional hard drives.

Similarly, they can be backed up to protect against hardware failure.

Also, as computer systems, they can be made accessible over a home network and the operating system itself can be enhanced and upgraded.