10 March, 2008

Portable media players

I recently brought a portable media player (PMP). It has an LCD screen with a 4.0 MP camera, and extendible 1GB memory!! I was dazed and awestruck to know that it could be used as an MP3 player too! All this at a meager cost of 3000 rupees....That's about 180 dollars. And on top of all this, it could play mp4, wmv movies at an astounding 25 fps ! The resolution of the screen is 221 * 178. Thankfully, a few software's on the device still seem to work, and among them is a nameless avi to MP4 converter !

I could have never asked for a better deal. I brought this one roadside, and was so dazed I didn't even check to see if the manufacturer's driver disc was OK. I came back home, and saw that it had the SONY logo on it, but no model number or any other identification. The PMP in itself is able to read E-Books, so off I went to the e-book folder, and found a Japanese document with the letters SPMP3050 within. I did a search on Google, and I came to know that it was a fake, but who cares!! As long as I can get my job done and keep myself occupied, I don't give a darn if SONY manufactured it, or some street side vendor!

I am in the process of disassembling its firmware, and Im gonna blog about this if I'm successful. The player identifies itself to windows XP as a flash memory when connected using USB. But when turned off, and a certain key is held, it identifies itself as a webcam! This is a secret im gonna share with you. Most Japanese and Korean devices do this while updating their firmware. That is, you need to be in this operation of the device if you wanna upgrade the firmware.

I am currently experimenting with the skins and fonts in the device. I have successfully skinned it to a vista clone, but am having problems with the font. Itseems, even the English font on the device has a Korean substitute!! As I don't know Korean (yet) it will take some time for me to figure out the workings of this wonderful device.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi!

I've buy last week a mp4 player with this chipset.

This have a 3 images like you describe.

I'm very interested in to put linux (uclinux?) in this device that have an ARM9 inside.

Have you finished some disasembling or have some information about the original firmware?

Emiliano
Neuquen - Argentina

ShashanK said...

Unfortunately, I have lost a lot of time on this device and still, I havent been successful in decompiling the OS.

And the answer to the above question is NO. You cannot install another operating system, especially LINUX, cause the devices' secondary storage seems to be flashed with the OS. You will not be able to have a functioning OS if you do manage to install, cause any existing OS is not built for this device, so will fail to recognize it.

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