Agreed. What a pita. It's enough to make me want a MythTV instead. If that wasn't such a pain to build a decent remote, it'd be worth it. I, too, want to enable bash, ftp, tivoweb, and extraction on my Standalone Series 2, but my wife would KILL me if I screwed something up and she lost her recordings. Keep in mind that we're WAY past the watching live TV thing anymore, so there's always 40-50 or so hours worth on it. Not to mention that there seems to be no simple source of information on the little things that could ruin your day. Take the sleeper iso monte, for instance. Looks cool, but it states that a software upgrade could trash your drives. Great.

Just one more thing that makes the empeg SOOOOO much cooler. The methodology is different. The empeg guys WANT people to be able to hack their units. It makes them more marketable. The tivo people make it as hard as possible, they just don't complain when people finally succeed. I mean, Adding tivoweb functionality seems to me like something Tivo would WANT users to be able to do. They should offer the guy $50,000 for the code and include it in their next update. There are hacks for using the modem line for OSD of caller ID info. I know a few people that would buy one JUST FOR THAT.

I guess I just don't understand the mentality. I mean, people are willing to write code for free, just to make their device do more than it was intended. Why not take advantage of that? I fail to understand how this would affect the bottom line of Tivo in ANY way other than positively. I mean, come on. There's even a hack to allow two SA Tivo's to check with each other to see if they can resolve a recording conflict. Sounds like a kiler app to me.

Too bad I'm too chicken to try out anything cool for fear of calling down the wrath of the wife.

On the other hand, there are very very few pieces of electronics in my house that if they broke I would be on the way to buy another. The Tivo is near the top of that list. Empeg is right there with it, It just may take longer.