D-Link MediaLounge DSM-320RD

[jac_goudsmit]

I'm in the process of setting up a MythTV backend that will hopefully work with my D-Link MediaLounge DSM-320RD (it supports UPnP). Currently I use TVersity as back-end.

The user interface of the DSM-320RD leaves much to be desired; basically it provides its own folder-browsing and that's it, so no Javascript or HTML or fancy customizable menus. Also, when you play a stream from the network, you can't use the navigation buttons on the remote except for play, pause and stop.

D-Link provides all the GPL-based source files for the player. Information about the hardware is widely available on the Internet, and it's no secret that it's based on the RedSonic DMA platform and SecureSOHO software. The actual media player and menu browser applications aren't open source.

I found out that the box launches a Telnet server, but there is only a short window of time after booting until the port to that Telnet server is closed. The good news is that the time-window is long enough to send a couple of commands to prevent this from happening, so you can telnet in to it and play around with a busybox (0.60) command prompt.

Furthermore the box runs a program (server.c, part of the SecureSOHO software suite, source available from D-Link) which lets you:
- Reboot the box
- Download files (I haven't tried downloading stuff to flash memory yet, I don't want to brick my box unless I'm convinced I can unbrick it)
- Run commands through system() (you won't see the output though, because it's not redirected to the network session).
This server program keeps running as long as the box is running, and its port is not firewalled off when the Telnet port is closed.

I noticed that the menu system is based on XML, which should make it very easy to at least customize the menus and screen backgrounds, but I haven't actually tried doing this (the XML files are also stored in flash, and I don't want to brick my box).

I also noticed that the firmware download (URLs to which are available from various sources on the Internet) simply is a tar.gz file with (I think) all bits reversed. This is a discovery I made a long time ago so I may remember this wrong.

I don't have specific plans yet on what I want to do with this knowledge. I purposely haven't made any changes to my box that didn't go away after a reboot, but I'm sure it's possible to build my own firmware and make improvements.

I hope this is a good place to share this information. I know it's "hacking" i.e. using the hardware in a way that wasn't intended by the manufacturer, but I think this is fair use and the hardware is after all my property, and I didn't do any "reverse-engineering" i.e. disassembling hardware or software, to get this far. There doesn't seem to be any "hacking" information on the D-Link Medialounge available anywhere on the Internet: the few links that I found that looked interesting, have all gone away or were forum postings that expired.

If anyone is interested, I can post more details. If I'm in the wrong place, let me know too and I'll back off.

===Jac

[yeahright]

Is it possible to mount a linux share with the medialounge?

[jac_goudsmit]

Originally Posted by yeahright

Is it possible to mount a linux share with the medialounge?

I haven't tried to mount an NFS share yet because I don't currently have an NFS server. This is on top of my To-Do list, though, because I haven't had much success in mounting local media (SD, MS, CF) to make backups of files in the flash: when I mount a device, a couple of strange-named files show up with nothing in them. Possibly D-Link modified busybox or the kernel to handle mounts differently, or maybe my hack to get a command prompt prevents some essential program from running.

I'll keep you posted!

===Jac

[yeahright]

Guess that goes for SMB then, too, or can the medialounge connect to SMB out-of-the-box? I'm assuming it needs it's windows software running on the back end, but, if not, perhaps it can use SMB.

I'm trying to help a user on another forum (htpcnews.com) with this. Basically, the d-link software doesn't pick up the drives on his file server, so I'm thinking there should be a way to run linux on the file server (which will be a web server, as well), but I haven't heard of anyone trying it.

It would be sweet if you get that thing to talk to the mythbackend.

I'll keep checking back.

Thanks!

[jac_goudsmit]

Originally Posted by yeahright

Guess that goes for SMB then, too, or can the medialounge connect to SMB out-of-the-box? I'm assuming it needs it's windows software running on the back end, but, if not, perhaps it can use SMB.

Even though the box itself runs Linux, the back-end that comes with it is Windows based, so if anything, SMB support is more likely than NFS support. Either way, I'll be trying both for sure, and I'll be looking into the kernel config (and source files) to see why mounts on SD, MS and CF don't work as expected.

Probably won't happen until at least next weekend, tho...

===Jac

[henrykuong]

Really great! This is I need. thank all eveyone 4 shared !
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