Rember MovieBeam?

[DaijoubuKun]

Do you? (I thought they went out of business).  Well because they are no longer sold at RC Willey I was given 2 boxes.  No antennas, but that's ok, I wasn't planning on actually using the service.  I wanted to hack the boxes.  To start I opened the box, which was very difficult because the screws use a star head with a hole in the middle.  I ended up using a very large set of pliers to grind the edges of the circular screw head and basically ripping them out.  I found a 160GB IDE Western Digital HD inside! WOOT!!!

After searching Google and several other search engines I was unable to find anyone who has actually hacked the MovieBeam box.  The only information I could find was that MovieBeam has claimed the box unhackable.  That sounds like a challenge to me.  There is a YRW (Yellow Red & White) input connection, but it has been disabled.  It seems these boxes are just rehacked TIVOs.  I"m now on a personal quest to successfully hack the MovieBeam boxes.  I"m NOT doing it to get free movies, I'm going to turn it into my own personal DVR!

If it's true that you can't hack the box, I won't feel defeated, apparently no one has tried, or tried hard enough.  I may even say the hell with it and see what I can do with 2 160GB HDs.  I'm going to start taking pictures and documenting what I've tried and publish my finding on my website.  I'll let you all know when information is available.

Until then... happy hacking! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[bassmadrigal]

Nice... You'll have to let me know how that works out.

Plus you can never go wrong with free 160GB drives... Western Digital NTL

[Justin]

That sounds like an interesting set up.  I wonder how well they will work as a DVR, speaking of how much do they run at RC Willy?

[DaijoubuKun]

they are no longer sold at RC Willey. I don't know anyone who sells them.

Update on the hacking.  I took one of the drives and put it into an external enclosure.  I can't even see it in Linux!!! The partition table is that jacked up!  My next step is to put it inside a computer and alter the partition type. Then I'll run some recovery software and see if it can find anything.  Altho I doubt that will work just because the data would be stored in a different file system type.  Also these things are more complicated than I originally thought.  I may not get anything out of it.  It would be cool if I could just for the fact that this is the first time I've tried hardware hacking.

[DaijoubuKun]

I figure I should quickly update this,  I know there are still hits here for this topic.

If you want to see what I did visit my blog at http://blog.tangorangers.com