As a Telecom landline customer I recently purchased a TIVO for the bedroom (I already have a HTPC PC in the lounge so I am familiar with EPG streams and have both DVB-T and DVB-S cards to 'fix' this for Freeview|HD) and I already knew about the EPG 'issue' with Prime and Maori, however now I have the unit I have been putting some thought into this.
The way I see it, with the TIVO getting the EPG data over the Internet, why cannot we/someone not intercept/append this request and fill in the blanks for the missing guide data?
I cannot image the EPG data would be encrypted, and would hope that it would be in some standard format (XML maybe) and that with a simple intercept and update the missing data could be added to the stream.
I would expect something like Wire-shark should reveal a lot about this communication, however I haven't used it much.
I would also guess (but I could be wrong) that a local DNS server with specific entries could trick the TIVO into getting its data from another, local, source. This idea was used at one time to trick Windows Product Activation into thinking it was talking to Microsoft servers.
Has anybody already done any of this work? I find it hard to believe I am the first to think about it. What, if anything, do people know about the TIVO guide data?
The EPG Collector project collects all the guide data and that could be used as a source (that's a big guess though).
Would anyone be interested in helping out with such a project?
I know there are legal ‘things’ around the EPG data itself, but that’s another argument – all I am trying to figure out is it possible? There would be no issues if dummy entries where added to the EPG to prove it works.
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