It is worth the trouble to me, because I wanted to expand the unit's storage capacity anyway. And the extra effort involved in installing hacks is minimal when you've already opened up the unit to get to the hard drive. Look in the dealdatabase forums for the sleeper ISO. It takes care of backing up your drive, restoring the image and expanding it on a larger drive, and installing the most common hacks. (FTP, telnet, video extraction, TiVoWeb, etc.)

You use a usb/ethernet adapter and the appropriate hacks to enable the ethernet connection. It is of course unsupported, as is the video extraction of course. I initially set it up with a compatible USB 1.1 adapter, but I would recommend going with a USB 2.0 adapter for the higher speed capabilities.