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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (43530)	8/3/1999 11:56:00 AM
From: Steve Lamont	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Taken from AV science message board... avsforum.com Well, a friend of mine just received his 14 hr ReplayTV and we decied to take it apart to see what's inside before installing it. Interestingly the hard disk appears to be a run of the mill Quantum Fireball IDE disk. We removed it and brought it to my office to check out on some test equipment. It really is an IDE disk and more interestingly it has a standard partition table. Because of this your average PC will recognize the disk as being partitioned and in use but cannot read Replay's disk format. It appears that the disk is divided into two partitions, a fairly small one (several hundred meg, to my recollection) appears to be their "system" drive. It stores the OS, lots of bitmap files, and other sorts of things needed to implement Replay. The second partition appears to be for storage of your recorded programming. The files here appear to be regular MPEG2 files stored individually within the file system. Replays disk format looks interesting. From a cursory inspection, it looks like it has some mirroring capabilities presumably for redundancy/fault-tolerance and that it offers most of the features of a modern filing system such as hierarctical directories, etc. It also appears that this file system is called "OMFS". Don't know what OMFS means (perhaps Object Management FS? O?? Mirrioring FS?). The system runs an embedded OS called "MQX". More on MQX can be found at their web page (www.psti.com). Anyway, we finished up the night by making an image backup of the drive onto our DLT tape library. This alone makes me more comfortable. We then put replay back together and did our initial install .. it works fine. Sometime in the future, I may analyze the disk image we stored to our DLT to see if I can code up a reader/writer for the format. It sure would be interesting to see what I could customize by editing files on there. We didn't get to spend much time looking at the "motherboard" (the disk was far more interesting!). But, the system looks like its based around a SHARC DSP, SONY MPEG encode/decode chipset, and (if I recall correctly) philips video decoder. There is also a section of the board that contains a modem implementation and another section which contains a SCENIX mpu driving a number of serial line drivers. Presumably this is what drives the DSS serial control and anything else that mignt be present on the RS232 port, it also may control the IR blaster -- which appears to be implemented with a Universal Electronics chipset. There is also a FLASH, which presumably is the auto-boot bios which handles early system initialization and starts the boot process from the HDD. And finally, an FPGA which could be used for any number of things. The most interesting bit here was a multi-pin header at the front left of the cpu board (near the FLASH) -- wonder what's on those pins!. There were also a number of solder pads for dip sockets all over the board (I think there were six) -- presumably left over from the systems development days. If anyone here wants to know more, or perhaps collaborate on this investigation, contact me at lostboy@lostboy.com. -Jim [This message has been edited by lostboy (edited June 30, 1999).]