Is anybody working on an enhancement and/or add-ons of the new FWr4585?

For the previous FWr4824, especially thanks to Mikkas PlayOn!X, we had several additional features available. Although the new FW is now out for several months I did not see any postings on add-ons or enhancements.

Ok, the new FW has many of the add-ons implemented, but still lacks Live-TV, Non-Shoutcast Radio and many others.

As a first step towards enhancements, I found a way to decrypt .rss-files used in the new FW. With this it might be relatively easy to understand the new FW and explore modifications and add-ons.
You can download a program from here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=T3Z0DZ04 which I found on an other Realtek related forum.

Usage: un-aes_rss encrypted.rss > unencrypred.rss

Personally I am still undecided if it's better to keep FWr4824 (and maybe add some features from FWr4585) or upgrade and try to implement some of the FWr4824 add-ons.

AFAIK no one including mikka is working on an enhancement of the new FW. Adding new IMS feeds to the new firmware should be pretty straight forward using similar procedure as with the PlayOnX! firmware but ..... unfortunately the latest firmware does not have a /home directory link to HDD which is what mikka uses to mount most of the new IMS feed (scripts.zip) and a lot of the paths inside the feeds refers to that path. Creating a /home symbolic link to HDD with the new firmware is not possible since it uses squashfs (read-only). The only way to create this directory would be to unpack the firmware; add the /home symbolic link then repack the firmware and flash your player.

Now you could use the same script as provided by mikka for the PlayOnX! firmware and install it on your HDD.

All that is left now is an entry on the original menu.rss file that points to the /home/scripts/menu.rss; the one on mikka's scripts. Since you still can not write to the filesystem the original menu.rss will have to be overmounted to somewhere writable and then edited. Just for fun this is how I would proceed to do that:

- copy the original menu.rss to USB Stick
- decrypt the file using PC so that it is readable
- insert a link to /home/scripts/menu.rss to the original menu.rss file
- copy edited menu.rss file to the /usr/local/etc/ directory
- ovemount original menu.rss to the edited menu.rss (mount -o bind /usr/local/etc/menu.rss /usr/local/bin/...../menu.rss

Voila ..... well at least in theory. To automate the mount process you could insert the overmount command in the /usr/local/etc/rcS file. Beware that it is my understanding that the rcS file is not run when going from "standy power" to "ON" only when the POHD is first initialized ..... plug into the wall socket.

Anyhow this is just food for thoughts if you ever wanted to add the IMS available on the PlayOnX! to the newest firmware. I would not even bother with the optware since the newest firmware has a hard time keeping up with just the service currently loaded on it.

With all that said IMHO you are better off with PlayOnX! Mikka's is continually upgrading and adding new stuff to the scripts/optware so this firmware gets better and better all the time. For the lastest news on PlayOnX! I suggest you visit: http://playon.unixstorm.org/about.php

Cheers !!!

Hi snappy46,
thank you for your update!

As I am using a Playon!DVR, mikkas FW was never a real option for me. But I used part of his scripts and optware to enhance the features on my PlanON!DVR (using the original FWr4824). In addition I 'copied' scripts from XTR* like xVoD, RSS-EX, BBC-iPlayer and got them working by semi-automatically changing thousands of file-names/links towards my PlayON!DVR setup.

(I even managed to create /home-directory by un-squashing and re-squashing the original FW, and then having all my rss-files under /home/....)

I agree, adding additional load to FWr4585 will further reduce the speed, so sticking with FWr4824 seems to be the more promising solution, especially as the new FW does not really add anything substantial or fix killing bugs.

Hopefully mikka is back soon ....

Rgds