After all of the effort that I’ve went through over the years to try to sell the things to friends and family, it feels odd to be unplugging my TiVo. Now that we’ve turned off our satellite TV service, though, there’s no new content flowing onto the TiVo, which makes it a lot less interesting. All we’re left with is 75 GB of old stuff that we’d like to get around to watching sooner or later.

Fortunately, TiVo hacking has continued to move on since I first added a bigger hard drive to my first TiVo over 4 years ago. Using the tools discussed on the dealdatabase.com TiVo hacking forums, I’m currently extracting all 75 GB worth of programming from an old TiVo and putting it onto a 120 GB drive that I had sitting around. Then, once that’s done, I’ll use mencoder to re-encode them into something a bit more modern then MPEG-2, probably XviD. This will make it trivial to play things back using MythTV, which is really the point of the whole exercise. While MythTV has its problems, it’s pretty good at playing back pre-encoded video, so I won’t miss that aspect of the TiVo experience.

Once that’s done, I’ll probably put the old TiVo up on ebay. I’ll be sad to see it go, but time and technology move on.

I guess I find it kind of ironic that I’m doing this on the same day that TiVo finally officially announces their TiVoToGo service. So, if my Series 2 TiVo was still working, then I could use it to stream DRM-ified video to a small number of Windows systems. If I had any Windows systems. So, instead of doing it to official way, I guess I’m just cutting out the middleman and doing it myself. As usual.