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• Interfacing to an Xbox Optical Drive

  1er octobre 2013, par Multimedia Mike — xbox

  The next generation Xbox is going to hit the streets soon. But for some reason, I’m still interested in the previous generation’s unit (i.e., the original Xbox). Specifically, I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to use the original Xbox’s optical drive in order to read Xbox discs from Linux. I was never curious enough to actually buy an Xbox just to find out but I eventually came across a cast-off console on a recycle pile.

  I have long known that the Xbox has what appears to be a more or less standard optical drive with a 40-pin IDE connector. The only difference is the power adapter which I surmise is probably the easiest way to turn a bit of standardized hardware into a bit of proprietary hardware. The IDE and power connectors look like this :

  
  
  

  Thus, I wanted to try opening an Xbox and plugging the optical drive into a regular PC, albeit one that supports IDE cables, and allow the Xbox to supply power to the drive. Do you still have hardware laying around that has 40-pin IDE connectors ? I guess my Mac Mini PPC fits the bill, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to pry that thing open again. I have another IDE-capable machine buried in my closet, last called into service when I needed a computer with a native RS-232 port 3 years ago. The ordeal surrounding making this old computer useful right now can be another post entirely.

  Here’s what the monstrosity looks like thanks to characteristically short IDE cable lengths :

  
  

  

  Click for larger image

  
  

  Process :

  1. Turn on Xbox first
  2. Turn on PC

  Doing these things in the opposite order won’t work since the kernel really wants to see the drive when booting up. Inspecting the 'dmesg' log afterward reveals interesting items :
  

  <br />
hdd: PHILIPS XBOX DVD DRIVE, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive<br />
hdd: host max PIO5 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4<br />
hdd: UDMA/33 mode selected<br />
[...]<br />
hdd: ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache<br />

  Why is that interesting ? When is the last time to saw disk devices prefixed by ‘hd’ rather than ‘sd’ ? Blast from the past. Oh, and the optical drive’s vendor string clearly indicates that this is an Xbox drive saying ‘hi !’.

  Time To Read
  When I first studied an Xbox disc in a normal optical drive, I noticed that I was able to read 6992 2048-byte sectors — about 14 MB of data — as reported by the disc table of contents (TOC). This is just enough data to play a standard DVD video animation that kindly instructs the viewer to please use a proper Xbox. At this point, I estimated that there must be something special about Xbox optical drive firmware that knows how to read alternate information on these discs and access further sectors.

  I ran my TOC query tool with an Xbox Magazine demo disc in the optical drive and it reported substantially more than 6992 sectors, enough to account for more than 2 GB of data. That’s promising. I then tried running 'dd' against the device and it was able to read… about 14 MB, an exact quantity of bytes that, when divided by 2048 bytes/sector, yields 6992 sectors.

  Future (Past ?) Work
  Assuming Google is your primary window into the broader internet, the world is beginning to lose its memory of things pertaining to the original Xbox (Microsoft’s naming scheme certainly doesn’t help searches). What I’m saying is that it can be difficult to find information about this stuff now. However, I was able to learn that a host needs to perform a sort of cryptographic handshake with the drive at the SCSI level before it is allowed to access the forbidden areas of the disc. I think. I’m still investigating this and will hopefully post more soon.

• ffmpeg udp/tcp stream receive frame not same as sent

  21 novembre 2013, par vivienlwt

  I am streaming a video on raspberrypi using command :

  ffmpeg -re -threads 2 -i sample_video.m2v -f mpegts - | \
  
  ffmpeg -f mpegts -i - -c copy -f mpegts udp://192.168.1.100:12345

  The remote PC with 192.168.1.100 uses ffmpeg library to listen to the input stream. For example :

  informat = ffmpeg::av_find_input_format("mpegts");
  
  avformat_open_input(&pFormatCtx, "udp://192.168.1.100:12345", informat, options);

  However, when I compute the hash value of each decoded frame on two sides (i.e. raspberrypi and PC), they DON'T MATCH at all. A weird thing is, among 2000 frames, there are in total 10 frames whose hash value are the same on the sender and receiver side. The match result look like this :

  00000....00011000...00011110000...000

  where 0 indicates non-match and 1 indicates match. The matched frame appeared 2 6 in sequence and appeared rarely while most of the other frames has different hash value.

  The hash is computed on the frame data buffer extracted using avpicture_layout(). On the Pi side, I just stream the video to a local port and there's a local process using the same code to decode and hash the frames :

  ffmpeg -re -threads 2 -i sample_video.m2v -f mpegts - | \
  
  ffmpeg -f mpegts -i - -c copy -f mpegts udp://localhost:12345
  
  ...

  The streaming source raspberry pi, is connected directly to the PC using cable. I don't think it is a packet loss problem. Because, first, I rerun the same process several times and the hash value of the received frames are the same (otherwise the result should be different because packet loss is probabilistic). Secondly, I even try to stream on tcp ://192.168.1.100:12345 (and "tcp ://192.168.1.100:12345 ?listen" on PC), and the received frame hash are still the same - different than the hash result on the Pi.

  So, does anyone know why the streaming to a remote address will yield different decoded frames ? Maybe I am missing some details.

  Thanks in advance !!

• Possible to stream video over 115kbps ?

  15 mai 2014, par Arcadio Alivio Sincero

  I need some advice from people experienced with streaming video.

  I have a task to put together a system that allows video coming from RS-170 (composite) video cameras and have them displayed on an iPad. The catch is that no wireless (no Wi-Fi, no bluetooth) is allowed. Only a wired interface.

  The physical I/O options on an iPad are apparently extremely limited, but I did manage to come across a company named Redpark that makes an RS232-to-Lightning cable. So my proposed solution is to have the video feeds go into a box with software that digitizes and encodes the video, and then sends it over RS232 to the iPad using that cable. The catch here is that the maximum bandwidth on that cable is 115kbps.

  My preliminary testing of this setup on a prototype system have been less than stellar so far. I set up two PCs, each with serial ports, and hooked them together with a null modem. I then set the baud rates of the ports to 115kpbs and then attempted to stream a web cam video feed over the serial connection in real-time using ffmpeg. The results weren’t very encouraging, but I at least did manage to get some sort of image to show up.

  I guess I need to play around with the ffmpeg encoding options some more. But I need to ask : am I wasting my time with this idea, or should what I am asking here be possible ?