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TiVo Canada How-To

For one reason or another, TiVo has never been available in Canada, which all my friends north of the border remind me of whenever the subject comes up (they're still fighting for it though).

There are ways of getting TiVo in Canada, some involve smuggling boxes over the border, some say the DirecTiVos work up yonder, but the most comprehensive guide to getting a standalone TiVo working in the great white north is the how-to at TiVo Canada.

This is probably the most intense and illegal hacking how-to I've seen for TiVo. It essentially is a way to bypass the TiVo service entirely (a long-standing community no-no subject), by pulling in XML listings of canadian networks from the internet and using a heavily hacked version of TiVo to use it as the programming guide. It's so complete they even have their own logo graphics you can download and add to the TiVo system and built a web-based TiVo service emulator that your TiVo will connect to instead of the real TiVo servers. The group operates from this site, offers files only from a password-protected CVS repository, and this 1700+ member Yahoo group.

Hopefully TiVo will see this group's efforts as enough demand to warrant releasing the service up there.

by Matt Haughey January 23, 2004 in TiVo

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