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thanks for the information Blackhole, it certainly explains why doing more sophisticated commands are difficult, especially considering the limitations of the hardware spec.
 
As af123 has pointed out in the past, If he had a clean piece of paper to start with and full access to all areas, there is a lot more that could be done with the Humax, but as it is, there is a core process (called humaxtv) that has been largely untouched and the Custom Firmware has to work around it
 
Nosferatu said:
What I get from what you're saying, since Humax are using proprietory blobs for the interfacing, even if we were to get more tools and apps to compile on the box we'd either need to rewrite our own drivers etc from the ground up or somehow gain magical access to the proprietary blobs.

So my last question, Do these proprietary binaries access the same kernel that we do? or are we effectively virtualising another kernel on top of the current firmware? I'm happy to stop biting legs after that if someone can tell me :) cheers (I'm guessing that would also answer my own questing regarding wiping 'root')
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I may be repeating things already mentioned above, however:

The broadcom chip that runs these boxes (yes, it's dual core, 400MHz) is a system on a chip (SoC) so there is a single kernel module which provides the hardware interface and a closed source library that Broadcom provide called libnexus. The Humax software is linked with this library and uses it to interface with the hardware. We don't even have header files for this library let alone the API specifications. As an example, if we don't start the Humax software the hard disk doesn't spin up. If we knew the right libnexus calls we could do that without invoking the Humax software. There's nothing special about the Humax software - it's a normal process under Linux, it just knows how to call the library which has access to the hardware through a dedicated device node. Most of the heavy lifting that the Humax does is in hardware (e.g. all of the AV decoding, encryption etc.)

What do you mean by wiping root? Root is read-only flash filesystem. If you were to wipe the flash you would also wipe out the bootloader and brick the box. The flash is artificially partitioned with sections for the bootloader, kernel, root filesystem, etc.

The Pi (since it has been mentioned) is also based on a broadcom SoC. It has a relatively slow CPU but a superb GPU. In fact, the GPU is actually responsible for initially booting the box - the reverse of most systems. The only reason the Pi can run XBMC and decode SD and HD content is that it offloads most of the work to hardware. An additional hardware licence key is required to enable the MP2 decoding too.
 
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