What is an OzTiVo?
An OzTiVo is nothing more than a USA TiVo or a UK TiVo that is made to work outside of it's intended country of origin in places where a TiVo service is not commercially available. In the beginnings of OzTiVo this meant primarily in Australia by virtue of the original experimenters being based here, but over time the original concept has been refined and adapted to New Zealand and many other countries that do not have a TiVo service. The OzTiVo community uses mainly USA TiVo's due to them being plentiful and cheap, but there are also a handful of the more expensive and harder to come by UK TiVo's. But no matter what type you end up using it will end up like all the other OzTiVo's out there which is fast approaching almost 1,500 in Australia alone happily recording countless hours of TV programs every day!
My personal involvement with TiVo started in October 2003 when I was looking for a solution to replace VHS tapes for recording long events greater than 4 hours that a standard VHS tape can hold (don't even suggest using Long Play - yuck!) and also put an end to the video quality inadequacies of VHS. I found TiVo - or more specifically OzTiVo - which is a non-profit based community of people contributing their free time to develop both software and hardware tweaks to make TiVo available to a wider audience outside of the USA and UK. In one afternoon I not only found a relatively inexpensive solution that exceeded my requirements but I also in time found a great bunch of people who are only too happy to help out others who want to experience how a TiVo can change the way they think about recording and watching TV.
Being a hardware orientated experimenter myself it wasn't long before I realised I could return what I know to the OzTiVo community. This originally began by offering to do PAL tuner installs for others (to date I've done in excess of 400 PAL tuner installs), but over time this has expanded to offering a wide range of hardware improvements and also repairs to sick TiVo's. I am in fact one of the very few people who have access to TiVo service information and can repair TiVo hardware at board level (that is diagnosing and replacing faulty parts on the board itself) which is important as time moves on to help keep the community of OzTiVo's happily doing their job properly. If you want to find out more about me check my biography in the "About Me" section in via the link in the left side panel.