Hacking devices can/will void your warranty and can turn your expensive consumer electronics into worthless trash if you don't know what you're doing. This blog is for information purposes only, and if you try to hack into your own consumer electronics, you do so at your own risk. The device I'm currently hacking is the Canon SX10 IS camera.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Dvdplayer, additional progress

Most of what I have been working on lately has been trying to understand the DvdPlayer program from Ellion. I've posted the source so far at opensphd.sourceforge.net in the HelloWorld git repository. Presently, I have it able to display a PNG and BMP on NTSC, PAL, and HDMI 720p and 1080i on the Iomega ScreenPlay Pro. I'm attempting to understand the video streaming. A99 has successfully added audio streaming to his version of the Hello World program.

In the meantime, Iomega has released r1.96 of the firmware. I have not investigated it yet, and quite frankly I don't have an interest in doing that because once I get my own DvdPlayer program written, I won't need their new firmware.

Superberney has also run out of time for maintaining IomTools, so he has agreed to open source it. I placed it out on the SVN repository in the opensphd.sourceforge.net, along with the changes I made to get the VSFTP and BFTP stuff working. I have not compiled and done any testing on it yet.

So there is plenty of stuff to do, and plenty of stuff in progress, just no discoveries to report right now. It's very interesting to see how Realtek constructed this. What I have learned from this is that the DvdPlayer program has plugin modules for pulling the data from files, http internet, streaming, transcoding server, etc, all which it puts in line to choose where the data comes from. It then analyzes it to determine what type of package the information is in, AVI, MPG, MPV, RM, etc. Again, all of those are put in line to choose which format applies. Then it unpacks and I believe at that point it sends the corresponding audio and video streams to the 1282 chip. They also have a module for picking out the SPU stream (subpicture unit, the subtitles). Anyway, I'm not getting any hacking done by posting this, so I'll end this post for now and hopefully my next post will be about playing a video.