UPDATE: After a few months in service, it was clear the AMD board and CPU were not cutting it. MicroCenter had a crazy sale on i7 2600K quad-core 3.4GHz processors, so I picked one of those up. I put it on an ASRock H67M-ITX board and added a 220W PSU, the latter requiring more fabrication on the TiVO case. This setup flew and was then used for the review of TVersity on SmallNetBuilder.

In Part 1 of the Repurposing a TiVo Series 2 set of articles I walked through my plan of repurposing our TiVO Series2 as a home theater PC (HTPC). For those of you coming here on this page and not seeing Part 1, you're probably thinking, "but I just want to install Linux on my TiVo and use it that way". Give up on that thought. The TiVo hardware is proprietary (ie limited or no drivers) and CPU power is very low. I explored this route for quite sometime and eventually gave up. I eventually settled on gutting the TiVo, doing some fabrication to make it in to an HTPC, and then placing it inconspicuously in to our cabinet under the TV. What I found was that was easier said than done. Granted, I did do some things along the way that took a lot of time, but overall this was what I could describe as a moderately difficult project. Let's press on!

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