Originally Posted by SEA-Flyer
Could you give me more information on the specific requirements needed to get this to work?
I live in Tokyo and would like to be able to watch some TV shows from back home in the US. Installing a TiVo in my parents house and hooking it up to their broadband connection, and downloading shows to my desktop and/or laptop in Japan would be very nice. Would this work for me?
Thanks
SEA-Flyer, I have an older, hacked Series 1 Tivo that I use to do this (the hacks render it very similar to the newer Series 2 with TivoToGo.
I just got back from two weeks in China, and was able to stay current with The Amazing Race and the Apprentice by transferring them from my Tivo in San Francisco. Here's how I did it:
I have an old, slow laptop on my network which stays on 24/7 (I use the old laptop because it consumes very little power). My internet access is via DSL through a Linksys router that supports VPN.
First I establish a VPN connection to my router. Then I use VNC to get to control my laptop (which is loaded with a VNC server). The laptop is connected to an X-10 controller, which I use to turn on those machines on my network which don't respond to wake-on-LAN. Fortunately, my primary computer does recognize WOL, so I issue the WOL command from the laptop (I have little batch files for all of this).
While the primary computer is booting up, I telnet in to my Tivo and start the server software (the program is called Tserver). I also use Internet Explorer in combination with more hacked Tivo software that lets me control the Tivo remotely and start whatever show I want to transfer playing on the Tivo (a necessary step to unscramble it before transfer -- TivoToGo doesn't require this).
Though I could, in theory, transfer video directly from the Tivo to my remote travelling laptop, I prefer to transfer it to the primary computer at home first. Unlike TivotoGo, this is a very quick process on a hacked Series 1 -- it takes about 15 minutes to transfer 2-hours of programming. Once it's on my primary comptuer, I convert it to mpeg (another 3 minutes or so) and it's ready for the long haul data transmission to wherever I am. Using telnet, I shut down the Tivo server.
Using rather crappy hotel high-speed connections in Beijing and Shanghai, it took rougly 6 hours to transfer 1 hour worth of video, which averaged a little over 1 gigabyte of data.
Once on my travelling laptop, I shut down the primary computer at home using either VNC, or a remote shutdown program from the old laptop at home. Then, I can watch the transferred mpeg in WinDVD.
It works great, and the video quality is fantastic.