Divx player + WAP = wireless media player

posted Apr 6th 2007 11:43pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: home entertainment hacks

[Jkx] sent in this great little hack. He slapped Openwrt onto a Netgear WGT634U (wireless router with USB) and used it to play host to a hard drive based divx playing Dvico 3100. Now he can update his player via his wireless network without having to drag the player back to a host pc for updates. The cost of the two is still less than an apple TV, and it’s a deal if you’ve already got one of the devices.

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Comments [11]

Reader Comments

nice use of off the shelf componets

Posted at 2:32 am on Apr 7th, 2007 by werejag

really nice, i will try it :)

Posted at 5:47 am on Apr 7th, 2007 by HCK7H60VRMN7

Nice hack,i love the WGT634U its really ez to add the “pringles antenna” to it and it works great ;}

Posted at 6:34 am on Apr 7th, 2007 by H4x0rX7

crap. looks like something is wrong with my media player. I can’t find the problem.

Posted at 8:29 am on Apr 7th, 2007 by HCK7H60VRMN7

It’s too bad the WGT634U’s are not being manufactured anymore. Are there any similarly priced alternatives (i.e. with USB port)? linksys NSLU2 seems a bit more expensive, but it could work. In the mean time I suppose ebay is good enough for finding these routers in the $40-50 range.

If you get a USB audio adapter ($5 on ebay) you can turn the router into a wireless jukebox. I did this and it works really well. I stole the concept from http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/

Posted at 3:52 pm on Apr 7th, 2007 by joe

A nice project, and definitely very clever, but it is one of those hacks that sort of leaves me with mixed feelings.

If he had gotten a used Xbox and installed XBMC, coupled that with a Ethernet Bridge or so called “wireless game adapter” (or hell, even the official WiFi adapter for the Xbox), he could have had a networked media player that would not only be much more capable (like being able to stream content rather than FTP’ing the movie to an internal HDD every time) but also cheaper.

This sort of reminds me of the “Industrial strength dance pad” that was put up last year. Yeah, it is impressive that he put it all together by himself, but at the end of the day he spent a lot of time and money doing something that could have been done easier, cheaper, and most importantly, better.

Posted at 4:54 pm on Apr 7th, 2007 by TJ

tj if you read the article you will notice that he received the divx player as a gift. It may be possible to return it for money but that is unlikely, usually its for store credit or an exchange like he said.

Often when hacking you have to deal with what you have, not what you can buy that would be ideal.

Posted at 5:30 pm on Apr 7th, 2007 by esk

Esk has true. This was a gift and I need to tweak it to meet my needs. That’s the issue.

I don’t care, if Apple TV, or a xBox will be better or cheaper.

To finish, I’m really proud to be on Hackaday headlines. Readers and Writers are great here (not the same stupid comments found on Engadget for this article)

Posted at 4:49 pm on Apr 8th, 2007 by Jkx

Engadget commenters tend to view everything as a product that has been put out by a company for them to consider buying, even when it is clearly not. Too often it is clear that the the poster of a news item didn’t read more than the title and look at the pictures of a web page.

If I ever publish a hack that might make it on Engadget, I’ll likely put Javascript in place that checks the referring website. If it is found to be Engadget it’ll either kick them to Hack-A-Day, or pop up a page explianing what the hack is and isn’t(I’m leaning towards the first, as I don’t think the ‘it’s a product’ commenters would read the disclaimer).

My WGT634U was pressed into service as my primary router when the other router I had kept reseting everytime an appliance came on, so I haven’t gotten around to hacking mine yet. I should pick up another cheap Netgear and replace it, but I want one I can flash to OpenWRT if I wanted to, which is hard to find around town for cheap.

As far as alternatives for WGT634Us go, I’m thinking a wireless print server would be good, pending a software hacker puts Linux on it. There’s no print servers supported by OpenWRT last I checked, and I’ve not heard of any running Linux already. So, it’d take a pretty decent embedded Linux hacker to get Linux running on a cheapy print server.

Posted at 6:46 pm on Apr 8th, 2007 by Tom61

Would love for this to go into mass production.

Posted at 5:40 pm on Apr 12th, 2007 by emulator

This is an excellent idea. The 3100 is a solid unit – simple, inexpensive and useful – folks love ‘em.

We have a lot of customers that have the 3100 already and want to make it wireless and don’t want to pay for a 4000, 5000, 4100, 5100 etc.. Also, not everybody has the time or expertise to setup something more complex.

But I suppose most the readers here have the expertise . . . so the sky is the limit for them – but for others this is a great hack – thanks for the contribution. I know some of our customers will be happy with this recommendation.

Paul
http://www.tvixbox.com/

Posted at 9:41 am on Apr 23rd, 2007 by TVIXBox