How to set up a Tivo for Sky Digital or Saturn

Disclaimer: This guide is not suppose to be comprehensive, It is just a very quick guide to getting started. You could follow this guide and be up in running in less than 20 minutes if you want but you won’t learn much that way. I highly recomment reading the oztivo site and in particular the howto, hints sections.

This setup guide is losely based on the old OzTivo US3.0 howto guide although things have changed alot since then. Note when I first wrote this howto it was based on an earlier tivo image than is available now, I have since had a number of people go through this guide and make additions to it. Thankyou to Dal & Grant for feedback.

PLEASE VISIT THE FORUMS FOR INFO ON HOW TO USE THE EMULATOR. USING THE EMULATOR IS EASIER AND MORE CONVENIENT TO SETUP THAN A MANUAL SETUP AS DESCRIBED HERE. THIS HOWTO WILL BE UPDATED SHORTLY TO PROVIDE THIS METHOD OF SETUP.

Note: New users, please touch base @ the NZ Tivo forum on here or email me (I enjoy hearing newbie first impressions, hehe). Getting an NZ Tivo community is in your best interest, guide data, channels, etc changes from time to time and you need to be informed.

There is still alot of work to do to set up Tivo for New Zealand, get involved, don’t just be a loafer/lurker. cheers…

Note: There is now a second howto that provides some extra info and tips and tricks (additional howto).

Check the hardware page for requirements

Motorolla and Zenith IR code files supplied by new users Stephen, Bruce respectively. Well done!

If your decoder is not supported then you could try getting it swapped which isn’t usually a problem although you might incur a small fee. There is a discussion on IR codes in the NZoztivo forum that might be of interest.

If your wanting to use a VCR good luck, first step is to check oztivo and google for any info on the model and if it is supported by Tivo and ideally if someone has made an IR code file already. Else you’ll have to make your own.

Recommendations: Make sure you have a compatible decoder or have the means to make your own IR Code file.

Download the Tivo image above and burn it to CDR.

Imaging your Hard Disk for Tivo For this procedure you will be following the first part of this oztivo howto. First attach your Hard Disk that you want to format to your PC (sorry mac users get a PC friend). Note, if linux isn’t your strong point unplug your existing HD’s to prevent accidentally formatting the wrong one.

Reboot your computer with the Tivo boot CD you just made above. This will load up linux and leave you at a command prompt. First determine what drive your HD is located at. Type: dmesg | more Scroll thru to find where your drives are referenced. eg hde: ST380021A, ATA DISK drive hdf: Maxtor 96147H8, ATA DISK drive hdg: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-104, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive Here you can see I have drives on designations hde,hdf, and hdg.

Now figure out which is the drive your going to use for Tivo. Also make a note of your CDROM drive designation. Now mount the cdrom mount /dev/hdx /cdrom where hdx is your drives designation. Now the magic mfs command… mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi <source> <target> Where <source> = path to Tivo image, and <target> = drive designation. eg “mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /cdrom/hdr112.30.oztivo /dev/hda”

Once thats done type poweroff and wait for it to shutdown. Then take out your drive and install it into your Tivo.

Installing your Hard Disk in the Tivo; not much to this step, just use the mounting bracket and make sure that if you modified the jumper pin setting on your HD that it is set as Master and not slave or you will pull your hair out trying to figure out why it doesn’t work. Oh, also note that your Tivo might come with the screws on the back screwed in.They’re security screws so they’re kind of difficult to unscrew without the correct screwdriver ( Torx T-10) but if you have a flat head screwdriver of the right diameter then you can manage it, otherwise if you really can’t do it take your Tivo to your local TV repair shop and they’ll almost certainly do it for free.

Installing the TurboNet card At the front end of of the Tivo Mainboard you will see what looks like a PC Card pin arrangement. Note that the motherboard is held in place by some small metal clips, you might need to use some pliers to straighten a couple of them out so that the Turbonet card can slot in. Just plug in the Turbonet card and run a Cat5 network cable thru the little slot in the back (next to the fan) and plug it in, you have to bend up the little metal tab in order to get it in. Might be a good idea to tape the cable up a little.

Note that if you are going to be networking to your PC then you will need to use a crossover cable.

Note that you don’t need to do any software configuration on the Tivo, DHCP networking is enabled on the oztivo image by default.

If you have a hub or modem router just plug it in. If your connecting to your PC then you will need to configure a DHCP server on your machine, on WinXP you can use the built-in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) software or use a thirdparty application.

Note that if you need (or prefer) to use a Static IP configuration see this nztivo howto, note tho you need a serial cable for this method.

Once you’re networked it’s trivial to change to a static IP. It’s probably documented in an oztivo somewhere too…

Setting an A/V Source Ok now you need to define an A/V source for you Tivo. This is where Tivo knows where to get the Video/Sound from, with settings like composite/s-video, decoder IR settings, etc. Each A/V source has channels assigned to it and each Channel has guide data. There is an A/V source configuration script that you use to specify the type of video input source (eg svideo/composite) you have and settings for how the IR blaster operates for that A/V input device. You will need to edit and then execute this script in order to create a new A/V source.

Note, please make sure you know what IR code you should be using.

Firstly, boot up your Tivo. Ignore the Welcome to Tivo setup screen on your TiVo for now and telnet into your Tivo.

Note that you don’t need to do anything with the OzTivo guided setup onscreen because this is targeted for automating the setup to the OzTivo Service Emulator, see NZ OzTivo forums for information on an emulator that a fellow NZ Tivo devotee has just set up.

Please be aware of the implications of using an unsuported emulator tho, not that any of this stuff is suported anyway… cd /var/hack/guide First, delete the old A/V sources ./delallsources Now download the following file (add-stb.tcl). Either edit this file on your PC or use one of various text editors on the Tivo, such as “nano”. nano add-stb.tcl Note that if you using windows the text file must be in unix format to work, you will need to either use a text editor that saves in the correct format (eg edit pad lite) or open it up in a text editor after you have uploaded it. eg FTP the file and then use nano to open the file eg “nano filename”, then the commands ctr-o, ctr-x to save and exit. You will also need to set the permission on the file to make it executable again, eg “chmod 777 filename”.

The main two lines you need to modify are (note that these lines do not appear all at once) CableBoxCodeNum <IR Code number> dbobj $source set Connector <3=Composite, 5=SVideo> eg for the Pace DSR600/2000 box the code just happens to be 20001 and if I wanted Svideo input i’d have it set to CableBoxCodeNum 20001 dbobj $source set Connector 5 Note that if you later (ie after your all set up) want to switch svideo/composite run dbset <AV Source #> <setting> <value>, ie setting = Connector, value = 3/5 Also, just as a precaution it’s good to increase the unattended IR blasting time… dbobj $source set TunerDigitDelay 350 dbobj $source set UnattendedTunerDigitDelay 800

Now execute the script by typing: ./add-stb.tcl

You might need to reboot at this stage but should be sweet. Now type tivosh mls / Look for a line with the Setup object, look at it’s ID number. Mine is 636950. Now type dumpobj <objectID> eg dumpobj 636950 Now you’ll see your AV source ID, it’ll be something like 636950/11 for example. You should only have one A/V Source ID unless you are using the TV tuner. Type exit at the prompt to get out of tivosh and back to the bash prompt. Note to DSR600 users (and others), if you use scart->svideo and your colours are wacky there is a setting on the Decoders onscreen menu that lets you switch between svideo/composite. Adding Channels Alright, now what we need to do now is to create a new channel object for each channel that you want. We do this using the ‘add-whole-channel.tcl’ script with the command: add-whole-channel.tcl <Channel ID> <Channel Num> <ShortName> <LongName> <A/V ID> eg add-whole-channel.tcl 7998001 1 TV1 “TV1″ 637957/11 The add-whole-channel.tcl script is in the /var/hack/guide directory.

Now for some reason in the Oztivo FAQ and elsewhere they say to copy and paste each line into the terminal and execute it. Not quite sure why that is because it works fine all in one go and you’re less likely to get errors but who knows. Anyway, the file  add-all-Sky-Channels is a very basic script that contains the add-whole-channel command for every current Sky channel. All you need to do is run this and your all set… .

First FTP the file to /var/hack/guide. chmod 777 add-all-Sky-Channels Now using the A/V Source ID you created earlier run ./add-all-Sky-Channels <A/V Source ID> eg ./add-all-Sky-Channels 637957/11 Ok now that should run and not give you any errors. When its done it’s probably a good idea to reboot your Tivo and confirm onscreen that your channels exist and that the IR blaster is working by changing channels.

Loading the ‘No Nag’ slice If the Tivo ever runs low on guide data you get these very annoying onscreen messages telling you to make a daily call. Can get very annoying… Fortunately you can get around this by loading up a fake slice ga.slice which has data until year 2050 or something silly like that… FTP it to the usual place, /var/hack/guide /bin/dbload30.tcl ga.slice

Setting the guide data source Ok, now we need to set up loadguide, the script that does the downloading and loading of the guide data. Loadguide has been left out of the new OzTivo image as they have moved to using the emulator for getting slices. Download LOADGUIDE and upload it to /hack/bin, chmod 777 it. Also download loadguide.conf and upload it to /var/hack/guide Now try running loadguide loadguide It’ll take a while to download the slice and load it…. Once this has completed go to “live tv” and confirm that you have guide data on you channels.

Note that because this new OzTivo image didn’t have loadguide in it you’ll need to manually set up a cron job (repeating task) for loadguide so that it will run on a regular basis and keep your Tivo upto date with the latest guide data slices. See the additional howto for info on how to do this.

Final Notes Note for serial cable users that don’t have a Turbonet or have PPP for Serial setup. You will need to manually load your slices. Download the slice and serial upload (type rz, then use the menu command to send file in ZModem format) to /var/hack/guide run /bin/hack/dbload30.tcl nztivo.slice when thats done run /bin/hack/fixup30.tcl and optionally force_index30.tcl Note see OzTivo howto serial setup for more info … Last major update 08-Nov-03