This hack has evolved into a proposed format for developing shared To Do lists. I’m calling it RSSTV. I hope you’ll take a look and consider participating. -AG
Okay, I’m not going go out of my way to explain myself on this one. But if you’ve already hacked up your Tivo to the point where you can telnet to it, it’s not a whole lot of extra work to display RSS feed data right there on the screen. Click on the thumbnail to see the RSS 2.0 Reader for Tivo in action. The display options need some work. I’ll probably try excerpting more from each post and then split the output over a few pages.
For the curious, here’s the code. It runs on top of another hack called Tivo Control Station. My three year-old Tivo runs an ancient version of Tcl so you don’t get non-greedy regular expressions or fancy string options like “string equal”. Tivo’s runtime is also very fragile so this code favors efficiency over elegance.
Crazy.
Update I’ve updated the interface, as described here.
http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fandgrusweb-20%2F8010%2Faf7f97bb-1457-41e6-b2f8-4af0f639de2e&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate Amazon.com Widgets
Andrew Grumet's Weblog 
This reminds me of some hacks Matt Kingston was doing a year and a half ago:
http://www.hitormiss.org/archives/2002/07/after-a-few-false-starts
LikeLike
Oh, and Matt has a bunch more Tivo scripts here:
http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/tivo/
LikeLike
Thanks for the links, Anil. It looks like Matt’s hooking into Tivo Control Station as well, though he doesn’t show us how he did it.
I should have said this above, but what I think is really interesting here is that we’re parsing a standard, widely deployed XML format (RSS) instead of screen scraping like most of the other modules. That should open the floodgates to all sorts of new content which will now be Tivo-consumable.
LikeLike
Very cool.
But of course the really cool thing would be if I could get an RSS subscription to the Now Playing list on my TiVo.
— Jack
LikeLike
Jack, check out the links Anil posted above. I think Matt K. did what you are talking about.
LikeLike
Oh, sorry, he did it as an HTML page.
LikeLike
This is so freakin’ cool…(cool enough to cpomment here without the ability to put a link up on my own blog)
My wife can now actually see what I’m doing with my time in the other room now…except…what makes me think she’ll subscribe to my loony blog now?
VO
LikeLike
Neat! Is there a way to make it run like a news crawl at the bottom of the screen?
LikeLike
Any one know of similar hacks for the Motorola Moxie DVR?
LikeLike