Hack 46 Playing MP3s on your TiVo

The Series 2 and Home Media Option allow you to play MP3s on your TiVo. Why not play them on the Series 1 as well?

Why not take advantage of that shiny box under your television to play some music when your TV-addled eyes need a rest? That's exactly what some TiVo hackers did long before the Home Media Option [Hack #63] came out for the Series 2.

The Series 1 was not designed for playing MP3s. Its 50 MHz processor is going to be seriously strained when you execute this hack. While nothing horrible is going to happen, don't expect to get concert quality sound from your television.

Mike Baker has made a binary of madplay available at http://tivo.samba.org/download/mbm/bin/madplay. madplay a small and simple Unix utility for decoding MP3s without using floating-point arithmetic, which is a good thing considering the TiVo's processor can't crunch floating-point math anyway.

Upload [Hack #36] the madplay binary to your TiVo's /var/hack/bin directory. While you're at it, upload an MP3 file of your choosing, dropping it into /var/tmp. Don't forget to make the program executable:

bash-2.02# chmod 755 /var/hack/bin/madplay

Try it out against that MP3 file, like so:

bash-2.02# madplay /var/tmp/music.mp3

Music to the ears! You'll probably notice the sound stuttering and the feeling that TiVo is struggling to keep up. It probably is, poor thing. I've had the best luck with MP3s that I've encoded in constant bit rate at a 32kHz sampling rate.

Using madplay will leave your TiVo in a state where the menus and remote control buttons do not make any sound. Other than that, everything should work just fine. If you can't live without your sound effects, reboot your box when you're finished listening to MP3s.

Don't expect to keep your entire music library on your TiVo—not even close in my case. In fact, be careful with the space in the /var partition [Hack #29], as TiVo may suddenly decide to clean it up for you. Of course, you could always NFS mount a directory [Hack #56] and stream a MP3 to your TiVo to play.