Hacking moviebeam
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.
