1.3 Backdoor Hacks

Backdoors are the key to accessing all the things that TiVo can do but are not, by default, exposed through the menus or through the remote. Most of these features were probably installed for testing and were not enabled in the menu system, because they were deemed either not really user friendly nor particularly useful. But who needs user friendly, anyway, when you can hack in some more advanced functionality?

All these backdoor hacks can be entered via the remote in the same way as all the other hacks. We do, however, need to convince TiVo to pay attention to these otherwise-disabled sequences.

All the remote control hacks in this book require you to enable backdoor mode [Hack #8] enabled. In normal operation—with backdoor mode disabled—TiVo will summarily ignore the special codes.