saintmike has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Howdy monks,

I'm pretty sure that at least some of you have cracked open your TiVo and played around with its internals. Most of what's going on inside is Tcl-based, but if you're used to Perl, Tcl stinks. Has anyone ever compiled perl for this platform?

In theory, it should be possible to grab a perl tarball, use the modified kernel sources from Tivo's website and compile it (using gcc to cross-compile for the PPC platform), just as described in Jeff Keegan's book for other C sources.

Now, before I start tinkering with it, I thought I'm going to ask if anyone has had any success doing that -- any TiVo monks here?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: perl for TiVo?
by hv (Prior) on May 02, 2004 at 12:54 UTC

    I don't know anything about TiVo, but one thing to be aware of is memory usage - if they've gone in the same direction as the games console manufacturers, the machine is likely to have much less RAM than you're used to in the average desktop machine.

    TCL can be very light on memory requirements, and the TCL core is very easy to modify to be lighter yet; Perl is rather heavier, and recent versions heavier still.

    I used TCL for a large application just before I started using perl, many years ago, and one of the first things I did was rip out all the floating-point support to save more memory - that took me less than a day. I wouldn't expect to be able to do that with perl.

    Caveat: my experience of TCL is over 10 years old (version 7.3 I think), and may not be relevant to more recent versions.

    Hugo

[reply]
Re: perl for TiVo?
by crenz (Priest) on May 02, 2004 at 18:20 UTC

    I don't see anything that would preclude you from doing it. You might be able to find a precompiled perl for Linux/PowerPC, but I guess it will be easier to just cross-compile it. They don't mention on the page whether the toolchain is for the PowerPC platform (ie., meant to be run on the TiVo) or for e.g. i386 or PowerPC workstations so you can cross-compile for the TiVo. Take a look at it. Maybe it could even be possible to compile perl on the TiVo itself? :)

[reply]
Re: perl for TiVo?
by Gunth (Scribe) on May 02, 2004 at 13:19 UTC
    I wouldn't fiddle with this kind of stuff. You can try though, see if it work, and then ++ from me in your post about it in Cool Uses For Perl.

    PS. Anyone want to bet he's going to be purchasing a new TiVo soon :-) just kidding.
    -Will
[reply]
      First off, there's nothing to be scared of. Many people have modified their TiVos and have been living happily ever after. I don't want to get too off-topic, just a couple of points:
      • Yes, TiVo is Linux-based. Complying with the GPL, TiVo has published their kernel changes, as mentioned in my posting.
      • I'm talking about Series 1 Tivos only. The series 2 TiVos you can buy nowadays can't be modded as easily.
      • If you get a network card from 9thtee.com you can program your TiVo from anywhere on the web, extract movies to watch on your laptop and relay IM messages to your TV, just to name a few. There's no way back once you get used to that.
      • TiVo is the only always-on box in my appartment -- I'd like to get perl to run on it to run daily tasks talking to servers on the Internet. I'm using Tcl right now, but it's a pain.
      I'm gonna start tinkering ...
[reply]
Re: perl for TiVo?
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on May 02, 2004 at 11:41 UTC

    Don't own a TIVO so I haven't had the chance to tinker with one, but isn't a TIVO Linux based? If it is then a port for Perl shouldn't be too hard depending on how close to a PC the Linux port for TIVO was.

[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom