I imaged a spare hard disk for my mate's tivo, to do a burn in test, and a dry run of installing the image, so I could find any tweaks I might have to do when I do the proper install.

I realised while plugging the unit in to the digital STB, that my mate hadn't given me the remote for it.

Hmm, either someone needs to have captured the codes for it already, or one of the standard boxes the tivo supports will work with it.

I remembered another way.. perhaps there's a pronto file on remotecentral, for the box, and I can convert the codes out of it to tivo format, and make up a slice.

I searched remotecentral, and I found one remote file, that codes for a unit with a similar number to the STB that my mate had lent me to setup.

I then had to work out how to get the codes out of the file, there must be some pronto software for linux.

I found references to "Tonto", which I downloaded, and had to fiddle around with the startup script, to get working, since it's java based, and it had the wrong paths for the jvm.

Once I got it running, I tried to work out how to load the file I had downloaded.

It was an NCF file, and I couldn't find any references to loading it, only the standard PSF file (or whatever it is).

Bugger. I decided to see if I could get the codes out of the file, using a hex editor.

When I loaded the NCF file into the hexeditor, I noticed it started with "PK", and when I wrote a file identification utility a while back, I found that this is the identifier of a zip file.

I renamed the file to .zip, and unzipped it.

I ended up with an xml file, and a bunch of bmp images. I looked through the xml file, and could find definitions of buttons, and functions, but no codes.

I eventually found something that looked like pronto codes near the end of the file, but it looked like a real mess.

I didn't want to have to write a parser for NCF files, to extract the button codes from them.

I didn't even know if the STB was turned on, because I couldn't see any output from it.

I skipped through configuring the IR codeset during the guided setup on the tivo, figuring I'd comme back to it later.

When I finished the GS, I noticed that now the STB was outputting some signal, which it wasn't doing during the IR test, so I went back, and tried all the remote codes available.

I found one that worked properly anyway, so I didn't need to write my own slice, or get the codes.

I found that the channel numbers on the STB were not in the "normal" places though, so I had to work out what the channels on the tivo were, and what I had to move them to, to lineup with the STB.

This wasn't too hard, but tivoweb caused the unit to go a bit unresponsive a couple of times, and it took me about 4 reboots to finish moving the channels around.