TangoRangers.com's Blog

Some time ago I posted in a forum that I was going to hack a moviebeam box.  Well lets put it this way, it’s kind of a waste of time.  Granted, they say it’s unhackable… not true. I found a great site at http://moviebeam.wikispaces.com/ that gave me a lot of good info.  However, upon my own experiments I have found that it’s a HUGE pain in the ass to try to retrieve movies.  The problem is when you hot swap the hard drive you only get to use it for about 3 min.  This is not enough time to copy a movie off the drive.  However, I was able to start playing a movie… at least once.  It appeared to be in a standard MPEG-2 format, just like DVDs.  So, if you do what is explained on the link above you can get movies.

NOTE! I do not condone stealing! It’s wrong! I did this as an experiment to see if I could do it! It was my first attempt at hardware hacking and I think I did a pretty good job.  Below is a way (only a theory, I did NOT test it) to get a movie.

After you have hot swapped the drive setup apache or an ftp server to point at the directory (ie /mnt/sdb2) so you can see the file listings.  Then from another computer use

wget 

then once the drive stops working repeat the hot swap and use

wget -c 

and it should continue where it left off.

I did NOT try this, it’s only a theory.  I have stopped my attempts to hack the moviebeam box (mostly because the last thing I want is a lawsuit).  If you are able to hack it and steal movies… well shame on you.