# Hacks for the rest of them?



## InspectorGadget (Feb 22, 2002)

FYI, I hack my TiVos, and those of my friends. I've got web servers running on them, etc.

However, the company I work for wants to make an application for the TiVo that goes beyond the simple HME platform, though we will use HME as the front-end. We would like to use the TiVo Linux resources to do some things for our application. It currently runs on Linux servers, and we're trying to source a set-top box platform cheap enough to make it commercially viable.

It would be so perfect if we could get our scripts onto the TiVo. Yes, we are doing this as a matter of course in development, but we're at a loss for how to commercialize it: Mere mortals would have to be able to install it somehow.

Any ideas?


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## cheer (Nov 13, 2005)

Not offhand...and just an FYI, the Tivos have very little CPU power so hopefully your app isn't too taxing. I mean, we're talking *very little* CPU power.


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## InspectorGadget (Feb 22, 2002)

Hmmm, how little CPU power? Got any sense, even gut-level sense, of comparison to PC CPU classes (PI, PIII, P4, etc.)?

Our app wouldn't be very taxing in the best cases, but there are options in our Linux servers to transcode media formats and it sounds like this would be oppressive in the TiVo...


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## cheer (Nov 13, 2005)

Transcoding video would be horrid. It's hard to give you an exact parallel, but think slow PII (233 MHz or thereabouts).


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## InspectorGadget (Feb 22, 2002)

Thanks for the info.

No, actually, it would be just transcoding audio, but it still sounds like somewhat of a struggle.


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## ForrestB (Apr 8, 2004)

A quick Google search found that:

Series 1 Tivo's have a 50 MHz PowerPC processor and 16 MB of RAM
Series 2 Tivo's have a 200 MHz MIPS processor and 32 MB of RAM


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

actually, only the s1sa's have 16mb... s1 dtivos have 32mb and s2 tivos (both) have 48mb.

IIRC, the PPC for series 1 runs closer to 66 MHz, but I'm not sure of that.

The 200Mhz on the MIPS processor is a bit misleading, because it's RISC + no FPU (so a 200Mhz pentium would most likely blow it away in most applications)


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## cheer (Nov 13, 2005)

BTUx9 said:


> actually, only the s1sa's have 16mb... s1 dtivos have 32mb and s2 tivos (both) have 48mb.
> 
> IIRC, the PPC for series 1 runs closer to 66 MHz, but I'm not sure of that.
> 
> The 200Mhz on the MIPS processor is a bit misleading, because it's RISC + no FPU (so a 200Mhz pentium would most likely blow it away in most applications)


Kind of depends...in many ways RISC (if the support software is written correctly) can absolutely outperform CISC, which is why the industry was so enamored with RISC for so long.

But yeah, the lack of an FPU is a serious handicap.

I honestly would advise against using the Tivo for anything other than...well, being a Tivo. It's got enough CPU for that (barely...esp. on the HR10-250), along with dedicated hardware to do things like encoding (on the standalones) and whatnot.

I tend to be minimalist in my hacks...I run TWP, mfs_ftp, and very little else. NCID but not as server -- the server is running on a PC. Anything that might impact the Tivo's ability to be a Tivo is something I am not interested in.


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

BTUx9 said:


> actually, only the s1sa's have 16mb... s1 dtivos have 32mb and s2 tivos (both) have 48mb.


sas2's have 32MB of memory, s2 dtivos have 64MB, hdtivos: 128MB. reference



> ...
> The 200Mhz on the MIPS processor is a bit misleading, because it's RISC + no FPU (so a 200Mhz pentium would most likely blow it away in most applications)


The NEC VR5432 processors in the S2's have an integrated FPU. It was dropped in the series 2.5 when they moved to the broadcom "stb on a chip" processors.

The NEC data sheet specs the performance at 6.6 specint95 and 3.6 specfp95. You can compare this to other processors here and here.


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