Hack Your TiVo

If you are like me, you have a TiVo. Gone are the '80s and the days of programming your VCR. Of course many people never learned how to program their VCR to begin with, so that is just another reason why the VCR should be replaced with new, better and easier to use technology. It's 2005 and if you haven't bought a TiVo yet, then it's time to get with it and upgrade today. For those that already have TiVo, I have a little "hack" for you! It's very simple to do, won't affect your warranty and best of all it will make fast forwarding all of those commercials a thing of the past. There are lots of TiVo hacks, but I'm going to tell you how to do one of the easiest and more useful ones. You don't need to be a tech guru to do this either. If you can push a few buttons in a certain order, you can do this.

Buried inside the TiVo's software, there is something called an "Easter Egg". Easter Eggs are found in almost any software from video games to computer applications. An Easter Egg is a small piece of code that is hidden. It was put in there by the programmer who wrote the software as a "hidden feature". In order to find the Easter Egg, you usually have to do a somewhat complicated procedure/steps to locate and unlock it to be used. TiVo has a 30 second skip Easter Egg. Unlocking this will allow the user to push one button on their remote to automatically fast forward thru the commercials. The skip time is 30 seconds because that is all the time an average commercial is. That means if during a programming break there are 4 commercials, then you would hit the skip button 4 times to automatically fast forward thru those commercials. Then in just a few seconds you would be back to watching your program - commercial free! So here is how it's done...

1. Grab your TiVo remote.
2. Bring up any recorded program. (You have to be watching a recorded program rather than "Live TV" in order to enable the feature.)
3. On your TiVo remote, key in the following sequence: SELECT, PLAY, SELECT, 30, SELECT.
4. If you've successfully entered the code, you should hear three "bings" in succession to inform you that you've successfully enabled the 30 second skip.

Note that any time your TiVo is rebooted (such as after a power outage or a software update) you'll have to re-enable this feature. Should you not like the 30 second skip, you can disable it by re-entering the Easter Egg exactly as you did to enable it.

***DISCLAIMER***
There is no guarantees that this feature will work on your TiVo, nor that it will continue to work in the future. Furthermore, if your TiVo catches fire or explodes or anything else goes wrong, it's not my fault. Use this Easter Egg at your own risk. (That's a joke of course.)