On 12/10/2013 11:11 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Dec 10, 2013, at 3:54 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Chris Murphy:
>>> Offhand I'm not thinking why a TV would need mount media as
>>> read-write.
>
> Patrick O'Callaghan:
>> In principle, it would allow the TV to flag shows that have already
>> been seen, or even delete shows under user command. Not that I know of
>> any that actually do this of course.
> Or remember the user-corrected rotation of photos that have been viewed.
>
> Indeed, and no doubt other features would come to mind, e.g. remember current
position in video so the user can pick it up on another viewing device, reorganize videos
into folders, configure per-folder sorting criteria, etc. etc. We could make TVs as
complicated as phones (remember when phones were simple?)
Yes, I agree all of those features are good ideas. I'd just expect, due to the
present state of affairs and past experience with embedded firmware modifying
FAT16/FAT32/exFAT media, that the device will eventually corrupt the file system. And if
that happens with exFAT, you're almost certainly SOL. If it happens with FAT32,
there's a better chance of repairing the file system but it also depends how
aggressively the device updates both FATs.
Granted, if they're implementing a simple file system this poorly, perhaps they'd
implement a more sophisticated file system poorly also. But that just means the
manufacturers are essentially incompetent in this particular area, which is my main
argument.
> The irony is that many of these devices already run Linux under the covers, you just
can't get to it.
That's interesting. In which case I'd like to think they're using the linux
kernel's FAT implementation, which shouldn't induce the corruption problems
I've mentioned. It could become corrupt by removing media while writes are still
occurring, which is normally in the category of user error. But in the context of a
consumer device like a TV, in my view it's actually a design flaw that a user could
induce such corruption. Losing the data that's unwritten is understandable, but
corrupting the ability to access what was long ago successfully written, isn't.
I wonder if any of these linux running products happen to have a kernel with other file
system support. Documentation might not mention it but maybe ext3 or ext4 formatted media
would also work (even if not officially supported).
Chris Murphy
My Western Digital Media box exports a CIFS filesystem that I mount on
my Fedora box, works great, faster than a locally connected USB disk. It
will also mount a USB disk with ext3 formatted filesystem. I believe
some people have figured out how to get root on the WD as well (but why
bother). I like it a lot, it plays almost every video I have.
For reference, here's my F19 box fstab entry for the WD box
//192.168.1.105/WDTVLiveHub /home/jwendel/TVBOX cifs
user,noauto,credentials=/home/jwendel/bin/samba/credentials,sec=ntlm,uid=1000,file_mode=0644
0 0
John