Old TiVo box turn into android box?

[mda99das]

A friend gave me his old TiVo box and was told to dispose of it.

Is there anyway to flash it so you can have some form of android running on it and turn it into a media box? It's got the basic workings of one.  I'm not bothered about the tuner aspect although I do have a Sat dish that was with sky, can they decode it to give Freesat? Something to store home videos and stream . I'm sure it can be done.

[mda99das]

Failing that at least I got a 500gb hard drive out of it.

[Adduxi]

Hopefully your friend has the direction from VM to dispose of the TiVo in writing, otherwise they may come looking for it back.  All VM equipment is rented and belongs to VM.  They should be collecting old equipment and disposing of it themselves as required.

[mda99das]

He was told to dispose of it himself through the e-waste recycling by his local council and was given blurb about being environmentally responsible. He's got a 360 box, about a year ago and just gave me the TiVo box over XMAS as I have an interest in electronics but not to the same level as bigclive.com on YT. You should check it out. But I'm sure there must be a way of flashing the software to repurpose it for an android box.

[Roger_Gooner]

You can't flash it but, as it's an unwanted box, you are perfectly free to remove the hard drive and use it after reformatting. Just bear in mind that the drive is old, so you won't want to use it for keeping critical data.

[mda99das]

Just removed the hard drive and going to install Linux on it. Its such a shame the Tivo board cant be reflashed, although in theory it is possible. The hard drives are 500GB SATA 5400 RPM  if anyone wanted to know.

[Roger_Gooner]

Seagate or Western Digital?

[mda99das]

Seagate. Works fine.

[nodrogd]

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@mda99das wrote:

Just removed the hard drive and going to install Linux on it. Its such a shame the Tivo board cant be reflashed, although in theory it is possible. The hard drives are 500GB SATA 5400 RPM  if anyone wanted to know.

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That is the only thing that will work. The box has three cable tuners. They will only work on cable broadcast frequencies, not Satellite or even Freeview.