Dongle question

[mkenyon2]

Forgive me, but, what does the dongle file do?

Are there newer versions available, and if so what benefits do they offer?

My understanding is, is that it feeds the MVP with connection information of some sort.

[User]

The Dongle.bin file is the operating system of the MVP. GBPVR sends it to the MVP and then it is run on the MVP. Think of an unplugged MVP as a computer with a BIOS only, when plugged in the BIOS requests the operating system (dongle.bin) from the GBPVR server and runs it.

[mkenyon2]

Ooohhh... nice... okay... where's documentation to hack it?

[elite]

Never done any work on it myself - but you might like to read some of the discussion over here

[mvallevand]

This is actually a complicated question and I will try try reply relating it to things that you might know.

The MediaMVP is really just an older vintage computer with 16MB memory, ~250 Mhz CPU (no math co-processor) and a LAN card. The big improvement over PC's of that era is the hardware support for a remote control, video out and especially embedded support playing mpeg-1 and 2 files and mp3. Old-timers like me no doubt remember the difficulties we had playing mp3's without stutter and would have loved to have had a computer this powerful. In modern terms this is like many are experiencing today with HD 1080, H.264, AC3 or even the progression to next generation of GBPVR, PVRX2. and that next generation MVP's will solve this for us.

Unlike PC's, the MVP don't have any disk support so it uses diskless workstation technology called "netboot" to load. This method uses a delivery mechanism based on tftp ("Loading Application") which you normally don't have to worry about since GBPVR does it for you. "Netboot" requests a file which it will execute when transfered and in this case it is a file called dongle.bin. It might be best to think of dongle.bin as a compressed image of a C: Drive.

When the firmware "executes" dongle.bin it first starts a full linux kernel. Also in the dongle image you will find drivers for all the non-standard hardware and several applications. Some of these application control networking, there is Busybox for command line support, and then the autoexec of Hauppauge client applications which respond to the GBPVR server. In the case of the Hauppage dongle, the client applications are really quite dumb, but thankfully the GBPVR servers are very sophisticated.

In the case of the mvpmc dongle, things are a little different. mvpmc uses a slighly optimized version of the same linux kernel, the same hardware drivers, and a more powerful Busybox. The biggest difference of course is the the mvpmc dongle loads a custom application also called mvpmc. Think of this as the Windows OS loading the Windows GUI shell.

The mvpmc application can really do whatever we want subject to the limitations of the hardware. I have added some functionality to the mvpmc shell most importantly for GBPVR users "emulation mode". "Emulation mode" is really just a mini application which tries to emulate what the Hauppauge client does, primarily based on sniffing the network traffic, with help from Dominic Morris who has done a lot of research on reverse engineering the Hauppauge protocol. Sub has already helped too, most notably with suggestions for improving the gui speed and he has made some changes in PVRX2 to make it work better with emulation mode.

I hope that helps.

Martin