I was playing around with my TiVo Series3 recently and I thought I’d see if there were any new backdoor codes, like SPS30S for 30-second skip or SPS9S for the on-screen clock. I didn’t really expect to find anything, but I was bored, and I’m a geek. But I did find something – SPS7S. It puts a kind of ‘map’ over the image of the video you’re watching. It appears to be some kind of calibration map designed to show how much overscan your TV has.
I’d never seen this before, and it seems to only work on HD TiVos – the Series3 and TiVo HD. Doing some digging around online it looks like this code has been on the HR10-250 HD DirecTiVo for a while, so it was probably inherited from there. But I could’ve sworn I’d checked all the SPSxS codes on my S3 in the past without finding this. So I’m not sure if it was there before 9.2a.
On other units, SPS7S has been a backdoor to disable display of the playback progress bar and the information banner.
It is probably more a curiosity than useful, but I thought I’d share. If you get a new TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD and it comes with older software (pre-9.2a), give this a try and see what you get. I’m curious if this has always been in the S3/HD code base, or, if not, when it was added.
