I got a memory stick through the post yesterday from Loughborough University. It had an accompanying letter explaining that on the USB, there was a PDF with details about the university. I plugged it in, and autorun opens the PDF. Hmph. It appears that the memory stick has been split into two partitions where one is read-only. I’ve had ones that present themselves as part CD (U3 anyone?) but a read-only 3mb partition is new to me.

Googling around, it appears that the only way to unlock it is to reflash the controller chip. The memory stick in question is made by Alcor although only the very latest of their tools recognize it (but always complain that it has 100% bad blocks which I know is not correct). The tools report it has a Toshiba manufactured flash chip although they report it as being an 8gb flash chip but the sticker on the stick says it’s 2gb.

So far, I’ve managed to accidently change the product ID, so now rather than a 058f:6357 it’s now a 058f:1234. It’s quite cool, it pops up asking you to insert a device to the hub. I assume that somehow I’ve overwritten the chip ID and it’s now not recognizing itself.

I’ll take it apart tomorrow and check if the chip is actually a toshiba – if not, hopefully my issues will be solved and I’ll be able to reflash it so the whole device is usable!

Before I wiped the blog last time (due to the spam), I had a post up detailing the solution I use on my netbook to playbook HD (720,1080p) content, the Broadcom CrystalHD. I had stated that the windows drivers were far superior and tried to detail methods to get the same performance under linux.

Well, it turns out that the guys over at VLC have added in support for the crystalHD which a great bonus. A few months ago the only players capable of supporting it under linux were a patched mplayer, any gstreamer-based player and XBMC, they each had their pro’s and cons.

• Mplayer – Worked quite well for high bitrate 720p (h264), pausing, resuming or skipping caused the kernel module to break, 1080p wasn’t watchable
• Gstreamer plugin – Never actually got this going properly…or if it was ‘going’ I couldn’t notice the difference
• XBMC – I imagine this would have worked GREAT, if it wasn’t for the XBMC overhead making the atom struggle. It didn’t suffer the same bugs as mplayer (the pausing)

I tried to grab the latest revision from the git repo at http://wilsonet.com (his trunk was a later revision than the crystalhd-for-osx one), but it seems his whole git repo is down. I still had a copy on my old installation so I grabbed that. To compile the kernel modules on the new 3.x linux kernel requires you to add an include (<include/linux/delay.h>) to the main header file. It seems that someone’s moved the mssleep() function to there from where it was before. That fixes compilation.

Once you’ve installed the kernel module for yourself, you also need to install libcrystalhd so you can compile VLC against it. Once you’ve done that, grab the latest stable VLC code, and configure it with the extra option –enable-crystalhd. Run a make; make install; As you would usually do and voila! Sit around for a while while it compiles and you have a crystalHD enabled VLC!

The only downside is I can’t seem to find a way to configure the CHD support inside the GUI, but starting VLC from terminal using ‘vlc –codec crystalhd’ forces it to use crystalhd for anything it can. Even skipping forward/backward works!

Just a quick one to say that I’ve trashed the last blog, it had never been updated and was covered in spam so it seemed a good move to start over. Although says it was posted on the 5th June, I actually only posted it on the 2nd December. It’s taken me a while to startup this stuff.