Anyone ever tried repurposing HD300's?

[osx-addict]

So, I gather that the HD300's are effectively custom Linux boxes (I think) -- has anyone tried to reuse the underlying hardware for other purposes -- such as XBMC for instance? Of course the first step would be to find out how to 'root' it as those iPhone hackers would say.. Anyway, just a thought.. Seems like it'd be a great XBMC box outside of it's Sage functionality..

As my kids say -- 'jus 'sayin

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by osx-addict

So, I gather that the HD300's are effectively custom Linux boxes (I think) -- has anyone tried to reuse the underlying hardware for other purposes -- such as XBMC for instance? Of course the first step would be to find out how to 'root' it as those iPhone hackers would say.. Anyway, just a thought.. Seems like it'd be a great XBMC box outside of it's Sage functionality..

Are you suggesting in the very same way developer of the "mvpmc" project repurposed the MediaMVP?

The fact that the HD300 is a Linux box doesn't mean anything at all, every piece of hardware need software able to drive it and to write software you need to know how the hardware works, its capabilities and which interface exposes. You need to find (pretty hard) detailed documentation of the hardware which most of the time is not available without signing an NDA with the manufacturer. There is the "hacker" way, but please don't forget that nowadays hardware is more and more complex and sophisticated that years ago and therefore harder to control, so those days are literally gone. The HD300 is second to none in terms of complexity and capabilities, you need to trust me on that.

I literally spent about 6 months of my time just to find out how to get simple PCM output from the HDxxx/MVP in order to write the Linux kernel audio drivers for the "Squeezeslave" project, at some point I was so frustrated that I was ready to give up.

You mentioned about XBMC, well that is open source code and will be very easy to compile it for MIPS or ARM or whatever you want, the real complexity is to write the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to control the specific hardware Audio/Video chipset and again without documentation and without a dedicated team of people it will be very difficult indeed and to be quite honest, lots of pain for no gain.

Eddy

[osx-addict]

Yeah, it was a passing thought and in light of the fact that no more HD300's are (likely) ever going to be made, it's probably a waste of effort -- but I'm sure it would be interesting. I suspect (but have never opened either of mine) that most of the parts in it are COTs parts (off the shelf) -- I'd think they'd want very easy to cobble together chips that have well developed/popular drivers and whatnot to reduce their required development time that they did several years back. However, I could be completely off base.

By the way.. In this review you can find a picture of the motherboard -- albeit not the greatest pic.. It does indicate that the CPU is the Sigma SMP8654 which claims to have Linux support (among others -- including Android, and WinCE).. Oh well.. Just mumbling..

P.S. Does anyone even know if the HD300 can boot off of a USB stick or load a boot loader via ethernet? I didn't see any sort of removable CF card inside in the picture linked to above.. Of course I suppose another way would be to figure out the format of the firmware updates -- perhaps with the help of a network sniffer.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by osx-addict

By the way.. In this review you can find a picture of the motherboard -- albeit not the greatest pic.. It does indicate that the CPU is the Sigma SMP8654 which claims to have Linux support (among others -- including Android, and WinCE).. Oh well.. Just mumbling..

The Linux drivers are provided in the SDK that SigmaDesign gave to SageTV developers by signing an NDA. All the HBR issues on the HD300 were caused by the SD drivers and not by SageTV.

Unfortunately the drivers are closed source, if they weren't, after a year from the acquisition you'll probably noticed a population of cloned HD300 by now .

Eddy

[wayner]

If you really wanted to tinker you could sell your HD300 and buy about 11 Raspberry Pis with the proceeds.

In terms of rotting 'it', well if that just means being able to login as root that is easy. Just telnet to the box and use root as the user - there isn't even a password.

[eric3a]

Well, one of my HD300s lost the LAN port and is now a very nice shiny paperweight on my home office desk.

Probably not the type of re-purposing you want though. But easy to do!
Eric

[osx-addict]

Originally Posted by wayner

In terms of rotting 'it', well if that just means being able to login as root that is easy. Just telnet to the box and use root as the user - there isn't even a password.

Really?? I had no idea.. Hmm..

[wayner]

Originally Posted by eric3a

Well, one of my HD300s lost the LAN port and is now a very nice shiny paperweight on my home office desk.

Have you tried USB wifi or Ethernet adapters?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by osx-addict

So, I gather that the HD300's are effectively custom Linux boxes (I think) -- has anyone tried to reuse the underlying hardware for other purposes -- such as XBMC for instance? Of course the first step would be to find out how to 'root' it as those iPhone hackers would say.. Anyway, just a thought.. Seems like it'd be a great XBMC box outside of it's Sage functionality..

As my kids say -- 'jus 'sayin

Really not much of a point to it. For the price you could sell the HD300 for, you could buy 4 XBMC capable streamers.

[eric3a]

Have you tried USB wifi or Ethernet adapters?

USB to LAN won't work because there are no built-in drivers in the HD300 I believe.
Not much interested in USB wifi, unless I find a dirt cheap one for the heck of it.
I'm moving to XBMC clients. Then I'll probably move to an XBMC PVR server now that XBMC is starting to support PVRs.
Eric

[emveepee]

Sorry XBMC needs 3D graphics, Open GL 2.0 and overall a beefier GPU than the HD300 has. This capability is only just becoming available on the Sigma Designs platform.

Martin

[SprDtyF350]

That old original MediaMVP extender software was the neatest thing since sliced bread at the time.. It worked really well..

Ahh. If Sage could just be simple again....

[drewg]

If you want to try your hand hacking the HD300, use the WDTV Live Plus instead. It costs 1/3 to 1/4 as much, and is almost exactly the same hardware. So there is no big loss if you brick it.

That said, even though the WDLXTV firmware project has made a lot of progress, they have been unable to change the core playback application (to, for example, run XBMC) because the graphics / display portion of the platform is locked down so hard.

Drew

[osx-addict]

Cool.. good to know stuff..

I do find it interesting about the supply-n-demand thing for the HD300's now.. I paid a bit over $400 for my entire Sage hardware/software combo in late 2010 (6 months before Google aquisition) and now see people selling each HD300 for, on average, $300/ea (assuming no issues). I guess I shouldn't complain if I'm in the market to sell at this point..