Mind Meld
The better half is away for a while, and my WMA11b just showed up, so I figure I have a golden opportunity for some serious hacking. Out-of-the-box it's already pretty sweet - you fire it up and do a little configuration (stupidly, it defaults to a static IP address), attach it to your stereo system and install some software on your Windows(TM) PC and you're ready to listen to music (or look at pictures). The software on the WMA11b itself isn't bad, it looks good and the controls are sensible. The other software though, to be blunt, sucks.
Two Windows "services" are started on your machine, but they don't actually show up in the usual place. You have to know to use "net stop" and "net start" if you need to stop or start these without rebooting - that's just sad. I can't figure out if they were lazy or just didn't want people messing with them. Maybe stopping and starting them a lot causes problems over time or something. Also, some part of the software required the ".Net Framework". Now I already had ".Net Framework 2.0" installed for some other reason that escapes me just now, but the installer insists on installing ".Net Framework 1.0" (not even 1.1!) anyway. Who knows what kind of problems that's going to cause in the future.
But back to hacking. The most basic thing people do is to replace the "player" software. The WMA11b loads the player every time it starts up, so if you know what you are doing you can load all kinds of things on there. The most popular player is wmamp, which is also open source. The neat thing about it (vs. the standard software) is that it uses the iTunes DAAP protocol and can see any and all iTunes servers on your LAN. Even better, there are open source implementations of DAAP for use on Linux et al. Getting them up and running is another issue.
This guy recommends daapd but it requires howl which is no longer under development. The howl guys mentioned avahi which has a howl-compatibility layer, but as it turns out there is another DAAP server mt-daapd which already has patches to use avahi natively, so I figured I'd check that out. I downloaded the sources for avahi and mt-daapd, and dropped into dependency hell.
Back in the days when I first got into Linux I installed Debian because a) I was technically savvy and b) it had a reputation of being the hardest to install. I figured if I managed to get it installed I would have already learned a lot about Linux, and I was right. But more to the point, I've stuck with Debian for all these years because it has always worked well for me and the package management rocks. Debian also has a reputation for being a little (or a lot) behind the times when it comes to its packages. When I installed apache a couple of months ago I got Apache 1.3. Well, avahi needed some libraries that were newer than I had installed. Debian has an avahi package, but it's in testing/unstable (ie. will be in the next stable release). I decided to take a chance and upgrade to "testing" and grab the canned avahi rather than try to build it myself. As it turns out, this was probably the easiest part of the whole process. The upgrade went perfectly smoothly, but avahi wouldn't run. I kept getting an error telling me avahi wasn't allowed to open the socket it was trying to open. It took a long time, but I finally figured out that my "old" kernel - 2.4.18 - only allowed very privileged processes to open such a socket, and avahi was not built with such privileges. It took a while, but I was able to upgrade the kernel to 2.4.32, and avahi started the first time I successfully booted the new kernel. Cool!
mt-daapd needed to be patched (link found on avahi's site), and the patch applied cleanly, but it couldn't quite build. The new source file that allows mt-daapd to use avahi wasn't being compiled or linked into the source. A quick hack of the makefile and I had a working (well, running) iTunes server.
From the same page as the daapd recommendation comes a program called wmaloader that allows the player software - Linksys suppied or other - to be loaded from a linux box too. wmamp is no longer under development by the original author, but these folks have been doing a lot of good work. I grabbed the latest wmamp image from them and used wmaloader to get it installed. Success! Not only is the new software installed, but I can see mt-daapd, and I can see the iTunes server on the Windows(TM) machine.
So I consider phase one complete. The server-end software appears to be pretty mature, so I expect there's little work to be done there. Stay tuned for phase two - building wmamp.
Two Windows "services" are started on your machine, but they don't actually show up in the usual place. You have to know to use "net stop" and "net start" if you need to stop or start these without rebooting - that's just sad. I can't figure out if they were lazy or just didn't want people messing with them. Maybe stopping and starting them a lot causes problems over time or something. Also, some part of the software required the ".Net Framework". Now I already had ".Net Framework 2.0" installed for some other reason that escapes me just now, but the installer insists on installing ".Net Framework 1.0" (not even 1.1!) anyway. Who knows what kind of problems that's going to cause in the future.
But back to hacking. The most basic thing people do is to replace the "player" software. The WMA11b loads the player every time it starts up, so if you know what you are doing you can load all kinds of things on there. The most popular player is wmamp, which is also open source. The neat thing about it (vs. the standard software) is that it uses the iTunes DAAP protocol and can see any and all iTunes servers on your LAN. Even better, there are open source implementations of DAAP for use on Linux et al. Getting them up and running is another issue.
This guy recommends daapd but it requires howl which is no longer under development. The howl guys mentioned avahi which has a howl-compatibility layer, but as it turns out there is another DAAP server mt-daapd which already has patches to use avahi natively, so I figured I'd check that out. I downloaded the sources for avahi and mt-daapd, and dropped into dependency hell.
Back in the days when I first got into Linux I installed Debian because a) I was technically savvy and b) it had a reputation of being the hardest to install. I figured if I managed to get it installed I would have already learned a lot about Linux, and I was right. But more to the point, I've stuck with Debian for all these years because it has always worked well for me and the package management rocks. Debian also has a reputation for being a little (or a lot) behind the times when it comes to its packages. When I installed apache a couple of months ago I got Apache 1.3. Well, avahi needed some libraries that were newer than I had installed. Debian has an avahi package, but it's in testing/unstable (ie. will be in the next stable release). I decided to take a chance and upgrade to "testing" and grab the canned avahi rather than try to build it myself. As it turns out, this was probably the easiest part of the whole process. The upgrade went perfectly smoothly, but avahi wouldn't run. I kept getting an error telling me avahi wasn't allowed to open the socket it was trying to open. It took a long time, but I finally figured out that my "old" kernel - 2.4.18 - only allowed very privileged processes to open such a socket, and avahi was not built with such privileges. It took a while, but I was able to upgrade the kernel to 2.4.32, and avahi started the first time I successfully booted the new kernel. Cool!
mt-daapd needed to be patched (link found on avahi's site), and the patch applied cleanly, but it couldn't quite build. The new source file that allows mt-daapd to use avahi wasn't being compiled or linked into the source. A quick hack of the makefile and I had a working (well, running) iTunes server.
From the same page as the daapd recommendation comes a program called wmaloader that allows the player software - Linksys suppied or other - to be loaded from a linux box too. wmamp is no longer under development by the original author, but these folks have been doing a lot of good work. I grabbed the latest wmamp image from them and used wmaloader to get it installed. Success! Not only is the new software installed, but I can see mt-daapd, and I can see the iTunes server on the Windows(TM) machine.
So I consider phase one complete. The server-end software appears to be pretty mature, so I expect there's little work to be done there. Stay tuned for phase two - building wmamp.
Labels: hacking
posted by zar' at 19:37
<< Home