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on April 28, 2008 at 4:16:43 pm
 


Activity

See the WhoIsDoingWhat page to see who in the community is doing (or planning to do!) what.


 

New graphics

 

Some think the MG35's original graphics are quite ugly, so the main effort was directed to improving the user interface. The resulting GUI looks a lot better. Unfortunately, this has to be revisited on each firmware release, since Altech adds graphic files to the new firmwares.


 

Support for other codecs

 

Since the EM85XX GPU runs microcode, it appears to be a custom DSP with generic IDCT, quantization, zooming, etc. It is quite possible that other MPEG-style codecs could be implemented in microcode.


 

Support for other containers

 

MKV support in particular, including:

  • streamed subtitles
  • bookmarking (chapters)


 

Faster and easier file transfers to/from MG35

 

MG35 supports 2 ways of transferring files to its internal hard drive:

  • via USB
  • via ethernet, using NDAS

 

The USB is currently the quickest way to save content to the HDD. It seems to have direct access to the HDD.

The NDAS is very slow, probably because all the communication is encrypted. Another shortcoming is that NDAS is not routable, so it's quite troublesome to connect MG35 over a WiFi link.

 

There are two parts to this problem: the limitations of the supported filesystems and the (lack of) choice on the network protocols side.

 

Currently, MG35 supports only FAT32 and NTFS filesystems on the internal HDD.

- FAT32 has a max filesize of 2 GB, which is not enough for a full DVD ISO image.

- NTFS partitions can only be accessed in read-only mode.

 

On the protocol side, we have a working FTP server for MG35. The problem is that FTP transfers are almost as slow as NDAS. We should find the real bottleneck here, before going further. Another bigger issue is that even if we build Samba, dvdplayer.bin has to be hacked to avoid remounting the hdd as R/O at certain times and to know how to mount a different filesystem (ext2).

 

NTFS write support

 

The latest versions of Linux NTFS drivers have included (weak) write support. NTFS-3G and such need FUSE kernel modules.

 

Roadblock: Need to update to FUSE-able kernel version (2.4.21+).

 

 

Samba server

 

One solution is to port Samba on MG35, to be able to add/remove files to the HDD via ethernet from Windows Explorer.

Roadblock: Samba is fat and ugly. Samba-TNG was apparently ported to an embedded system. Still need to disable huge parts of it though. Investigation continues in contact with Elrond/LKCL.

 

Update: OpenEM86XX has Samba in it. Toolchain is the same, so it should port pretty easily. Not sure if server is included.

Update2: Unfortunately, the SMBD compiled for ARM takes up a whopping 4MB of code. Well beyond a reasonable target size for our player.

Update3: The new SMBD binary is down to 1MB. Still forks though.

 

SSH server

 

This could be a good replacement for telnet.

 

Dropbear is reported to be a small implementation of an ssh server and an ssh client that together come in around 100k. It has no external dependencies (I.E. it does not depend on OpenSSL, using a built-in copy of LibTomCrypt instead).

 

For FTP, an SFTP server would also be required (best known implementation is the OpenSSH sftpserver). The advantage is that we could then use something like Sftpdrive (Windows, shareware), MacFUSE (Mac) or SSHFS (Linux) to transfer files to/from MG35.

 

sshd is built, but not tested.


 

 

Playing streamed media (e.g. IP TV, internet radio).

 

Seems that Sigma Designs provides an example app called netplayer. This should be capable of playing content directly from the net, such as internet radio. Too bad it is not provided in the original firmware :-).

 

Maybe KML specification is useful for this.

 

On their support forum, Altech claims that "In MG-35's product trait, it is hard to support Internet Radio.". It's not obvious why they cannot do it... (Audio buffering in-memory would work for undecoded frames. Video buffering would be significantly more challenging. Disk pre-cache might work there. Also note that MP3's can be HW or SW decoded.)

 

(VasileB: just an idea: if we are able to port any audio player which knows streaming, we can rename it "mp3play" and start it using the Play button on the front panel. Does netplayer from the mg350hd firmware work by chance? no! )


 

Web interface

 

Function of the web front end:

User

- playing media files (launch player and blank screen)

- simulating the remote-control (wrapper to fipmodule!)

 

Administration (password-protected to keep family members from accidentally changing config as they play with the web-interface)

- Change name of NAS machine

- Change web interface password.

- Change smbmount name/password (needs smbmount wrapper)

- Get screen dump.

- Daemon status: control whether ftp and web are launched at startup (use telnet to reenable)

- Stop/start telnet, ftp and web (safer upgrades)

- Get software VERSION and view online README.

- Package installation


 

Use MG35 as MythTV frontend

 

It could be possible, but will need far more knowledge about the device than we have today. If done, it will significantly increase the value of the device. This project tries the same thing for Hauppauge MediaMVP, so maybe we can use some of their experience.

 

Since several PVR packages talk to the Media MVP, the MG-35 could also run an MVP emulator, and then would be able to work with any PVR software like GBPVR, BeyondTV, etc., and could take advantage of all the plugins, appearance managers, etc. that those packages offer, and would be able to play HD content as well.

 

There is an MVP emulator already written for the MVP as part of mvpmc, so a lot of the work may have been done already, and just needs box-specific adjustment to create the emulator.

 

Emulation on a 150MHz CPU is asburd. Perhaps just use a HAL?


 

Album/DVD cover

 

  • New menu system supports thumbnails. Covert art shouldn't be much of a stretch. JPEG only, since it needs to be in YUV output as quickly as possible.


 

Support for connecting an ATAPI DVD drive

 

Support in firmware for:

  • directly playing DVD disks (not clear if EM8511LF includes CSS decryption. API is included, further testing needed.)
  • dvdbackup, with some form of GUI (Speed???)
  • audio CD ripping/encoding


 

M3U support

 

The Korean MG35_1.4.5_KOR.upgrade firmware as it is on the al tech site DOES SUPPORT M3U files... If you go to playlists you see the M3U files in your collection. But of course, in real al tech style, it's not straightforward. Playlists with files from different folders don't load (or take a ridiculous long loading time) and it seems that the #EXTINF: tag has to be filled (playtime in seconds). Winamp does this, Windows mediaplayer doesn't.

 

So if you don't mind some korean text (navigating is easy as all icons are in english) and don't fear some testing, you can have M3U support.

 

Here is a way to create MG35-compatible playlists from iTunes playlists.

  1. First, I use Playlist Generator, a Freeware Tool, to extract my iTunes Playlists to .m3u.
  2. I open them in Textpad, a Shareware Texteditor. Textpad offers to search and replace in multiple files. So replace the path info within all files with one click.
  3. replace the \ to an Linux-compatible / within all files.
  4. put all m3u-files in the root of your hdd and they should work.

 

Example on how the m3u should look like:

 

music/2Pac/2Pac - All Eyez On Me (Book One)/2Pac - All Eyez On Me (Book One) - 05 - How Do U Want It.mp3

music/2Pac/2Pac - All Eyez On Me (Book One)/2Pac - All Eyez On Me (Book One) - 06 - 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.mp3

 

There is no problem if you have created your m3u files with Winamp and they have the #EXTINF:246, information in them. The playlists will also work with the #EXTINF:246, information, as long as you have changed the backslash to slash. Very important is that eveything is case-sensitive.


 

Web browser

 

  • Due to lack of keyboard and mouse (as well as limited screenspace, memory, possibly disk), this will be an interesting project. Since basic requirements for any real web browser include HTML4, EcmaScript, and CSS, it's unclear whether it's even possible.
  • Links seems to be a contender.


 

Delete media files/directories


 

NTP Support

 

Update: A new version of rdate was ported, and tested working. Still requires a gateway to be set up (either via DHCP or /usr/bin/init).

(Ed: Is clock drift really an issue?)

 

Either OpenNTP or NTP to set correct date and time for the web server and for displaying on the OSD.

 

BusyBox has rdate to set the date from a remote server. A better solution is ntpclient, which seems to be suited for embedded applications.

 

 


Wake-on-LAN (WOL) support

 

Update: ether-wake now ported. Shell script to activate from server listing file?

 

It would be great to be able to remotely start a media server configured for WOL. The list of servers that can be started may be in a text file on the hard drive (it could be the same file used for speeding-up nbtscan).

 

 


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