Hacking the Hava Titanium

A week or so ago I purchased two Hava Titanium HD units made by Monsoon Multimedia on Woot.com. FedEx delivered them yesterday morning. The Hava is a TV “place shifter” the way a DVR is a “time shifter”. It takes video in and sends it to your pc via your local network or the internet. This model also allows you to plug an external USB hard drive into it and record shows on it. It has both wired and wireless network connections. The units I picked up on Woot didn’t come with the wifi adapters so I ordered one of them on Amazon.com. It arrived a day before the Hava units.

The reason I got two of them is so I can take one apart and still have one that’s operational. This blog is about Hacking the Hava Titanium HD. Hacking in the good, non-destructive way the word was used in the beginning. Taking the Hava apart, analyzing the hardware design, and learning how the firmware is put together and works. It runs a version of Linux and is listening for telnet connections so if I can figure out the root password I can telnet into it and play around.

When I decided I wanted to know more about the Hava Titanium I googled for “hacking hava”, “hacking hava titanium”, and even “hacking monsoon multimedia” with no relevant hits. Since there doesn’t seem to be any website consolidating information and links to resources about the Hava Titanium units I created this blog. If you know of any relevant sites or info post a comment with a link.

Enough of the introductory post. I’ll post more including pictures of the inside later.