Trying to hack the RSS Channel
One thing we here at PSP Fanboy find frustrating about the RSS Channel feature on version 2.6 of the firmware is that you can only add podcasts via the PSP's built in web-browser. So we thought we'd try to hack our way in so that we can add our own feeds at will. Unfortunately, this is proving a tad bit more difficult than we originally thought. Until we crack it wide open, we thought we'd share our findings to date with you to see if anyone out there surfing around the wilds of the Internets could figure it out.
Mount your Memory Stick Duo on your computer and navigate to the SYSTEM folder. Inside this folder are the BROWSER and RSSCH folders. The RSSCH is the new creature that belongs to RSS Channel. Inside this folder is another folder called CHANNELS. Here you will find any image files (feel free to replace a few of them with images of the same size and format and with the same name, in effect customizing the look of your podcasts) that are associated with the RSS files to which you've subscribed and a file called CHLIST. If you crack open CHLIST in a text editor like pico you'll see that there are some basic flags before each bit of data that the PSP uses to find the podcast. Unfortunately, simply replicating this data around the information of the feeds you want to add doesn't appear to work. A file shows up in the list, but it is empty of information and fails to connect. I tried just replacing the URL on one of the working feeds with no luck. I tried editing in a hex editor, too. The PSP would seem to take the text of a valid RSS 2.0 feed, scrape it for the enclosure information, and then compile that text into the CHLIST file, which appears to be a binary. Now we just need to figure out how it does this and how to crack it.
