21. program the tivo with a personality, then build a puppy-cyborg that barks and records your favorite shows. you could stream the dogs thoughts and what it currently sees over the net

Posted at 1:20PM on Nov 5th 2007 by steve diraddo

22. Why not use one as a home automation controller. A basic interface is all that you need to configure it with, so a remote should work fine for that. I2C or similar would be more then adequet for communications to all of the devices and should be easy to rig in. And I would think that you could simply use it as a pass through so that when you aren't playing with your home configuration it just routes the regular TV signal through it so you don't lose a set of video drops on your display. Shouldn't need much processing power or storage so any old Tivo unit would work.

Posted at 1:35PM on Nov 5th 2007 by Blind

23. purchase (or make) a small volt reader and use it to monitor voltage ratings comming of your gen/solar pannels. or monitor voltage usage by your (insert electronic device here).

Posted at 2:11PM on Nov 5th 2007 by Freshnessninja

24. Instead of network this or linux that, what about this clever little hack. Using a Tivo to record a tv program, and watch it when you want at a later time. Oh, wait. Who does that?

Posted at 2:13PM on Nov 5th 2007 by Necrofire

25. Working with/for a doctor's office, we've always wanted a way to display information onto the waiting room video screens (Yes, TVs... but the "1984" way sounded cooler) I'm imagining a passive/pass through video thing that will let normal cable tv through, but when we want to run our PSA, all the TVs will switch to show what we want them to...

Also, be able to show disney movies on the TVs but have them stored on a network computer.


Lastly, if you're Tivo is IN your car, and your car gets stolen... wouldn't it be kinda pointless? or are you thinking about a)streaming it off-site or b)post-recovery...

Posted at 2:20PM on Nov 5th 2007 by jose lope

26. i know from spending too much of my life working for telcos and cabcos that a lot of older model dcts and dvrs give off a lot of radio noise. some rental boxes from the last place i worked were even listed as class a under the fcc. while i'm sure there's better uses for a dvr, a directional radio jammer would be nifty (and probably illegal, so don't forget the disclaimer).

Posted at 3:22PM on Nov 5th 2007 by ed penwell

27. Well, you could mount it on a chassis and use it as a brain for a robot; with several, you could build a "swarm". Attach a vacuum cleaner/swiffer, and you have a Tivoomba.

Posted at 3:27PM on Nov 5th 2007 by Skyler Orlando

28. Use it for both recording Normal TV coming in but add a bittorrent interface. It gives you a place to grab and store video content(movies and TV... foreign broadcast items) without a luggy PC. You make sure it is networked to the rest of the house so that all the machines can act a terminals and stream both TV's and movies. It will help to add more disc space of course but Black Friday is only days away and you know damn well I am going to be grabbing the killer drive deals.

Posted at 6:10PM on Nov 5th 2007 by paige

29. I think that the idea of modding the tivo is great. there sre still some problems with the tivo (lack of cpu power.)
recieantly I have been messing around with xbox linux. my idea is to run the systems together as a pair, the tivo could function as a coax in/out and the xbox could do all the core prossing work. an added bonus is that both systems are easly moddified.

Posted at 9:17PM on Nov 5th 2007 by ian

30. The perfect setup would be MythTV as the platform, bittorrent style movie/iptv sharing, social networking features, Games, GoogleApps!

Posted at 11:44PM on Nov 5th 2007 by Sh3llz

31. I work for a student radio station and we use a Tivo to record CCTV footage. We also put as the audio track the audio from our broadcast to provide another logging system.
Not innovative, but shows another use out there.

Posted at 4:07AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Macaba

32. To bad this is a US only challenge.
But your next one will no doubt involve technology used outside you own country, right?

Posted at 5:45AM on Nov 6th 2007 by maneuver

33. I have never own a Tivo, but I would assume that you could use it as a MAME arcade of some sort. If you get MythTV working on it, you could convert it to an all in one unit (Multimedia and games). This way if you have kids, a system that plays games and media for every room is not only possible, but save the warranties of your Playstations.

Posted at 8:55AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Yeshua Watson

34. They can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is more of just a mental excercise type thing and not a "US only challenge". He's just saying "hey, here is this piece of tech that has been tweaked in the past. This is what others have done with it. Can you think of something better?"

Whether the tech is available to you or not in your country shouldn't matter since we're just tossing ideas around. In this case specifically, you've got a box which contains storage (hard drives), a basic processor, and video decoding capabilities. Just based on that information you should be able to think of ways to use those components without ever having to have a Tivo in your hands to play with.

The box was originally used for subscription based media recording and play back (and has any hardware needed to achieve that). So you have storage, basic processing capabilites, a TV tuner, and mpeg2 decoding. Networking in some form is either there already or has been added ot the system. Linux has been ported to it in some form. What can you do with that?

Using ideas people have posted already:

Pushing networking and bitorrent onto it, you can fake the subscription service that you currently pay for by having the box find torrents related to what you normally watch. This is a neat idea because it lets you break away from their services if you like the hardware but don't want to pay a mountly fee or you want to use different algorithms to find new shows you might like based on what you watch already (one of Tivo's services)

The web conferencing thing is a great idea because the hardware you are adding (networking, microphone, and web cam) isn't terribly complex, but it's a fairly different use of the box compared to it's original intent.

To show my bias, I also really like my home automation idea just because it strikes me as a completely different use from what everyone else is thinking about for the thing. I've never used a Tivo specifically before in my life. I might not have a great grasp on what it's hardware can do, but I can still think about how to use it in other ways? I might be completely wrong on how capable it is, but if so, at least my idea might inspire someone else to think of something that would work.

Make sense? Don't look at this as "OMG, he has a prize I can win." His post doesn't even say a prize is going to be given out, just that they might send out some hard ware if they see something really inspired in the comments. Just brainstorm and enjoy the challenge. If you are running the race for the golden apple at the end, you're missing the fun of the race.

Posted at 9:06AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Blind

35. >>> I have never own a Tivo, but I would assume that you could use it as a MAME arcade of some sort. If you get MythTV working on it, you could convert it to an all in one unit (Multimedia and games). This way if you have kids, a system that plays games and media for every room is not only possible, but save the warranties of your Playstations.

Posted at 9:07AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Blind

36. This is what I get for not double checking my comment before confirming

*** I have never own a Tivo, but I would assume that you could use it as a MAME arcade of some sort. If you get MythTV working on it, you could convert it to an all in one unit (Multimedia and games). This way if you have kids, a system that plays games and media for every room is not only possible, but save the warranties of your Playstations. ***

I like this idea. But does the TIVO have USB plugs already? and if not, have they been added by others already? I'm wondering how the controllers would be plugged in.

Posted at 9:17AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Blind

37. You could use it to create a 3d hologram using multiple projectors all connected to the same one, except showing images in different angles to give the impression that the image is in 3d

Posted at 11:42AM on Nov 6th 2007 by Mikotoke

38. First time commenter. I just wanted to say how brilliant a thought exercise this was and I can't wait to see what comes of it in the coming weeks.

Posted at 3:15PM on Nov 6th 2007 by Jake

39. to #38, um, i don't see how that would be possible uless you were just going the red/green glasses route, in which case only one projector would be necisary.

As for the mame idea, why not just use a modded xbox with a couple of emulators and xbmc? It comes with (nice) controllers, its cheaper, its got a well supported Ethernet interface, the softwares as good or better, and it can store and play xbox games to boot.

Posted at 4:17PM on Nov 6th 2007 by Wolf

40. kudos to wolf. combining the xbox and tivo would be a killer hack.

Posted at 5:37PM on Nov 6th 2007 by ian