TiVo is a brand of next generation video recorders that provide many advanced recording features and record to a hard drive instead of traditional video tape. These types of recorders are often called a PVR for personal video recorder or a DVR for digital video recorder.

TiVo was first launched in 1999, there have been other companies that have released similar products but TiVo has by far remained the most popular. A TiVo box is essentially a scaled down computer with a hard disk inside running TiVo’s own version of Linux. The idea behind the service is you connect this box to your TV and to your phone line or internet connection and the box will download your local program guide to your box for a service fee. Once you box is updated with the latest program guide you can select what programs you want to watch and the Tivo box does the rest. You can even pause and rewind live TV thanks to the box always recording a buffer of TV.

With TiVo’s popularity this has encouraged several user groups to develop hacks for the TiVo boxes, as the TiVo service was originally only available to the US, UK, Canada and Taiwan, several user groups have been buying up Series 1 Tivo boxes off eBay and modifying them to work in other countries, they have even reverse engineered the TV guides writing their own versions for their unofficial TiVo boxes to download.

The DIY bug has also inspired other groups to produce versions of PVR software like Myth TV for Linux and Media Portal for Windows that clone the functionality of TiVo’s idea and more. Microsoft themselves have even produced a PVR version of XP called Media Centre that lets you set and forget you TV recordings from a nice interface just like a TiVo box.