Firmware - Western Digital - WD TV HD Media Player - Page 9

I just bought this box to play my lossless music on. I have to be honest that I am lost on reading this thread. Can someone explain to me about what I would need to do to be able to stream with this box. Will I have to download firmware that you guys are creating and install? Would I have to take the box apart and change stuff inside?

disc0: It's a hardware problem (a design problem, really): the cat5 plug doesn't stay in the trap door properly/snugly. I'm only using it because it was the only usb ethernet dongle I could FIND at the local store.

As long as the dongle doesn't have a part that has to open for the cable to insert, you're probably ok: I think I have pretty much all of the usb network drivers loading and working. If not, just let us know your usb dongle's vendor id and product id's and we should be able to get you the right driver. (in xp, you can find this in the device manager properties for the device, under Details: "USB\\VID_*&PID_*")

Thank you for the explanation Zorander, currenttly i'm out of money, I'll take a look in some stores and see the best options I have and when I could buy I'll tell you.. Thank you again. Regards

Hi, i have a WD HD and i discover this post, i have the read the thread but i don't undertand it at all can somebody explain me how can i install one of this firmware i want to try samba i where can i found a compatible ethernet adapter, i think that i have to intall the fimr a an external usb memory but i don't know how o do it. thanks

I wait for these support 2 months

I still cannot do that test because I still miss the kernel modules to use mount.cifs.
I can tell that the inverse, playing a divx in streaming from the wdtv to my pc works smoothly.
About NFS, it seemed harder to get it working (several daemons and several modules to crosscompile and get to work together) so I tried samba at first.
By the way now I'm getting good speeds (about 700 KB/s which I think is the maximum speed I can get over the wireless bridge that connects wdtv to my wifi network, half of the bandwidth is taken by the bridge), it was my buggy iwl3945 driver that was causing the slowdown... Now I fixed it installing fresh drivers from compat-wireless project.

argf -> Cifs is in zorander distro ! ( /lib/modules/cifs.ko )

Mount a Network share works ! but the problem is the .DB file create by Wdtv ...

EDIT : If we mount the data in /tmp/media/usb/USB1/Nfsmount it work's !!!! ( in system parameters -> Media Library off )

Divx playing from network successfuullyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Report :

No problem for playing divx by network ...

For Bluray RIP 720p or 1080p my network adapter is too slow ...

But it's a very good news !!!

Now We must find witch adapter is the best for wdtv !

I'm going to make some shopping tomorrow !!!

Best job!!

Thanks for your time, I'm reading this post everyday

What's the best adapter USB-Network to do it? I've to buy one

Regards from spain!

Hi All,

Quick question. I cross compiled nano and added it to my bin file, but when I try to run it on the WD TV, I get the error "applet not found". It seems like the os is trying to find nano in busybox, rather than using the binary that I compiled. Does anyone know how I can change this behavior?

Thanks,
Bob

I have problem with my wifi dongle based on Realtek RTL8187L chip. I'm using ext3-boot 0.3 firmware. It looks that wd recognize it but don't have propriety driver. I attached log from putty. When I reconnect dongle I get message Can someone explain how to add new driver to firmware? Sorry but I'm newbie in Linux.

@Zorander

I read your post about similar problem with other Realtek chipset. Please give me advice me what I should do to get it works? Do I need connect dongle by usb hub or just need another driver?

 

putty.txt 18.30859375k . file

I just got my rs232 usb dongle and a level converter, so maybe I can do something useful, too.

Anyone got an idea how to integrate WiFi support? Obviously something low-footprint, maybe Mobilinux might be interesting?

It should be as easy as crosscompiling needed modules for your adapter and wireless-tools (or wpa_supplicant).

Alright then. My serial access is only half working - I can't send anything. Any tricks regarding serial access I should be aware of?

Nice work! I can't wait to get my WDTV playing movies from my SAMBA share. I'd like to explore the Wiki to get detemine which USB-to-ethernet adapter to buy. Can someone point me to the link?

Also, has anyone got a wireless USB-to-ethernet adapter working? I'd sure like to go wireless if possible. Thank you!

Can you provide the link to the Wiki page?

http://wdtv.wetpaint.com/

Not sure why Tobbers' link was posted as the majority if not all documentation provided in this thread have been updated on a wiki posted in the first post. WDTV Wiki has a great deal more information than the other link. Maybe Tobber or a Mod can edit his link so we are not creating confusion when referencing "the wiki".

wireless will still be useful for copying files over(as opposed to) streaming....draft-n usb sticks are getting cheap now....will be easier to find them instead of usb-to-ethernet adapter..

in my place, i could not find any of the supported ethernet adapters...but there are plenty of usb wifi(both n and g) sticks for very cheap price...pls add support for them too...

n yea..i think its mature enough to package into a major release with end user support....
Zorander?

Using Zorander's 0.3 firmware I managed to get cifs mounting to work. (cifs or nfs required for large file support, smbfs can't do over 2gb) I didn't have to do anything special at all, it just worked.

Still not sure why my original efforts were hanging, I think it might require additional writeable files/dirs. I tried both cifs-1.50c "backport" and the stock 2.6.15 cifs. Stock comes out closer to the module size that zorander produced.

My most useful observation for others to know about: the mcs7830, even via a usb2 hub was able to sustain the throughput necessary for a 1080p h264/dts in mkv movie. (if anyone cares, my usb hub, the one that comes with playstation 3 rockband, seems to be able to power an external hdd too.)

Filesizes tried (i wont name names):
13gb (h264/dts 02:41:30)
11gb (h264/ac3 02:15:00)
8gb (h264/ac3 02:16:18)
13gb (h264/dts 02:33:25)

Fast forwarding was slow and painful, but did work. I watched 2 films right through and noticed no audio skew or slowdown issues (even under intense high bitrate scenes). The other files I just seeked to scenes that were likely to be high bitrate.

I mounted the cifs share over the usb key, that is /tmp/media/usb/USB2/xxxx-xxxx/ (volume id of fat filesystem). When I didn't do this but mounted under the device, I could browse video, but not music or pictures.

I also updated my backported mcs7830 driver to the one that comes with 2.6.28.3, this will work with the Sitecom adaptors and another one too. This could be identical to argf's driver listed on the wiki, I didn't compare the diffs. patch here http://tardfree.net/wdtv/

I've had some ideas of knocking up a simple webgui to assist in mounting/remounting network shares. Personally I'm not interested in storing media on the box (I have a substantial NAS setup already) but I can see why this might be useful to others. With ftpd and smbd running I was very close to out of ram, under 4meg free while playing, so for me, those will be the first services I disable to get more functionality working, if ram becomes an issue.

cheers
tardfree

Thanks for finding this! I turned off INOTIFY and DNOTIFY in my kernel config and now my reiserfs module is working (it hung on mount before).

I think that the INOTIFY and DNOTIFY options were what were keeping tardfree's cifs and nfs modules from working as well.

I actually couldn't even insmod sunrpc because of missing symbols (__inode_dnotify or something similar)

Also, you may want to check out my latest ext3-boot build: It will automount all ext2 and ext3 partitions underneath the usb key so that they will all be findable under media library as well, and I added some more fs utilities: mkfs.hfs, mkfs.xfs, mkfs.ext2, blkid.

There's also a lsusb that I wrote that gives good detailed info that is usefull for debugging.

Example output: It shows vendorid, productid, where it's plugged in, which usb version the device is, and how fast that usb device is, as well as identifying the device.

I attempt to mount ext2 drives with -o sync -- I hope that will make things work smothly for us (ext2 has the decided benefit of working fast under linux and thanks to fs-driver.org we can access it just fine from any version of XP or higher). I'd still like to test it more--especially plugging/unplugging drives. I wish I could get rid of that "unsupported format" error when I plug them in.

I do have access to a couple (maybe more) wifi dongles to test with so I may work on that next.

I am in the process of converting mincrosslinux, a modular embedded build system, to create images for the WDTV from scratch. It is make based and uses ipkg files for base and addon packages.

I am matching the package versions to the versions on the stock WDTV, along with any needed patches to match changes made to the WDTV source.

There are currently two distribution targets, wdtv and wdtv-pivot-boot.
The wdtv distribution is incomplete. I am only building the open source components, and some are not set up yet. The goal is to make all the open source components from scratch, then creating and installing a wd proprietary package on top to form a complete system. Possibly some proprietary components can be replaced with open solutions.

If anyone is interesting in helping, go to the sourceforge page and send me a message.

http://mincrosslinux.sourceforge.net/

Building is fairly easy:
cd dist/wdtv
make get-required-imports
make build-required
make build

This will get all required archive sources, build all required packages, then assembly the dist.

Again, if anyone is interested, go to the sf page and send me a note.

I'm positive impressed about what you did here, since the sources were published.
Only sad I'm not capable to help, because I have no knowledge about linux.
Just hoping to got from you an enhanced firmware to install.
Keep up the work!

Wonderful.... give a look here
(hxxp://www.mhdworld.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=481&forum=10)
what was done with another linux based player. A web-interface could be very usefull for end users, like me.

Hi everyone, great thread!

I just signed up so i can keep an eye on your progress
I'm really looking forward to on-board DTS decoding

I bought the device as a one box solution to accompany my flat screen tv.
I don't want to buy a 5.1 system just so i can decode DTS and i really don't want speakers all over the place when the TV has 2x good speakers inside it

If it could be made to decode DTS audio and output it over HDMI like it does when i play non-dts videos it would be a fantastic solution!

Are people still working on DTS decoding or has it been put on hold while LAN adaptor support is being developed ?