Nice

MMMM, yummy!

This looks nice.

Jingle all the Way

Dex wants!

I have posted details of my Linux shell prompt hack over at http://moviebeam.wikispaces.com. Check it out if you are interested in breathing a bit of life into your player and have some time on your hands.

One more thing... if you are interested in having early access to the hack details, contact me at my email dexter DAWT reilly AT gmail DAWT com. I'll probably beta test it with a few people before making the site public.

-dex

The root filesystem is in firmware and two separate partitions are found on the hard drive (again, locked to work only with the moviebeam player). It is possible to make permanent changes to the contents of the hard drive. I'm investigating if it is possible to unlock the drive permanently. Now that I have root shell access to the running system many possibilities are out there.

I'm working on documenting the hack but have been very busy at work. Next week some time...

-dex

Chris,

The partition table is a standard one and contains valid data. The problem with drive access is that they used a secure hard drive mechanism that requires software on the player to unlock the drive. You must then hot-swap the drive over to a standard Linux system to access the drive contents. The timeout on the lock is very short (about 3 minutes) so you would not be able to get much data off the drive before it locks again.

My current hack requires you to hot swap your drive once to install some software on it. You can subsequently reinstall the drive into the player, boot the device and have full shell access including access to the hard drive contents.

The movie files are locked with DRM and are unlikely to be easily playable so there is little information on the hard drive that is of interest. My primary interest is being able to reimage the device and use it as some form of internet appliance.

If there is anyone out there still following these comments, I've been able to work an exploit on the MovieBeam player which gives me complete access to the system. While the player is running I can telnet to a shell prompt and inspect and modify the contents of the fileystem. I can also install and run my own code on the machine. This is a significant step in the direction of being able to repurpose these devices (for anyone so inclined).

In the next week or so I'll try an set up a web site with the exploit details.

-dex