A mysterious reader graciously wrote in with a clever hack that allows you to essentially re-record and edit your TiVo’d shows with no additional hardware or software. I haven’t tried it yet, as I do my editing and conversion on PC, but it looks interesting.
Tivo can playback and record a TV signal at the same time. This means if you have Tivo set up to record through RF, just put a line from RF in to RF out and it can record the video it’s playing back. This allows you to edit video, lower the quality of video and many more things. Just hit record and play back a video and Tivo records it with ffwds editing out parts you don’t like and at whatever quality you like.
There is also a great effect of the the screen fading to white as Tivo copies its own live signal. The picture is Tivo copying itself to white as it buffers it’s own signal and replicates faults like making a copy of something over and over again until you have nothing. The picture gets smaller (the screen should be full blue) and you can almost see the status bar has copies of itself behind it.
These are features Tivo does not have, many other DVRs have and many people request. Since I figured it out, I do it all the time. All my videos in my playlist, which are just a hand full now, are these edited videos. I have not seen this hack anywhere. Tell everyone about it.