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!

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!

One of the workarounds of this is to use the firefox addon, modify headers which allows you to modify your http request headers. This is all well and good, but I’ve recently started using chrome again. Upon searching, apparently there isn’t an equivalent addon for chrome. Trying to come up with another workaround, I came to the conclusion that the method to use would be running a local proxy.

I’ve started off by using Charles’ Proxy which allows me to either add or modify headers for every request. I told it to add the headers
pragma: no-cache
cache-control: no-cache
to all the requests, then I set up chrome to use it as a proxy (localhost:8888), and voila. Uncompressed images in chrome!

For that matter, it should also work for any browser or program supporting http or SOCKS proxies.

Happy browsing!

The first hurdle was to find a computer to act as the base of the setup. I didn’t have much laying around that was very usable, I had obtained a few old laptops (Pentium 1′s, 8mb RAM kind of old) but they really weren’t up to the task. Maybe I’ll do a post about those later on.

It just so happened, that one of my customers happened to have just upgraded her computer, and wanted to get rid of her previous one and so the base of the HTPC was born!

It wasn’t anything fancy, just a HP DX5150 with a 1.8ghz Athlon. I got it stripped down, and threw a version of Windows 7 on there. As expected, when I tried to play any kind of video higher than or even equal to 720p, it would stutter. It appeared that I needed something to accelerate the process, my original thoughts were to get another broadcom mini pci-e card like I have in my netbook, but that wasn’t DXVA compatible. In the end I settled for an Nvidia G210 giving me half decent 3D acceleration and acceleration for all the video formats I wanted to use (H264, VC-1 and MPEG-2). Oh, it was only £25.

So far, my HTPC had only cost me £25, I was on track. Then suddenly: drives! I had overlooked that I needed a storage solution. I dropped ~£50 on drives (1x Samsung 1TB, 1x WD 500gb), bringing the total to £75.

In conclusion, I now have a fully function HTPC running XBMC, capable of full HD video, all for £75. It’s still in the tower behind the sofa for now, maybe I’ll give it a new case in the future.