Activity
See the WhoIsDoingWhat page to see who in the community is/was working on what projects.
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)
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 SFTP, another 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, and working. scp support has yet to be debugged.
Playing streaming video
- Need to get source for a working video player first
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
Ongoing work by Jon Gettler.
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
Ed: Where to rip dvd's and audio cd's to? The network? Only one ATA/ATAPI device is supported on the IDE "bus". OKFW has CDDA extraction/player already written. Should be simple to port.
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
Application design is now open.
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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