Digital Photo Album as movie player?

[Enzo]

I recently won one of these bad boys.


http://www.amazon.com/Burnes-Boston-Dig ... B001N1J39O" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Has a small internal hard drive which is I'm guessing is partitioned to hide the "OS", but can accept a SD card. (Which I have, 2GB.)

The first thought that came to my mind was "Could I play movies on this?" after playing around with it for a couple minutes I found that it had a settings menu in which you can control the a 'slideshow interval' time, the minimum being 1 second. Now with tons of video to .jpeg converters out there if I could somehow edit that variable to be 50 milliseconds I could get video play back, as long as the hardware permits. Of course the video would have no sound but I'm not too worried about that at this point.

Basically I want to know if there are any program that allow me to explore hidden partitions on the hard drives of devices such as this one. So I could either wipe it 100% clean and possibly find a distro of Linux to install on it or possibly modify the software.



~ Enzo

[tom61]

The hidden partitions on most consumer devices are viewable under Linux. However, this seems to have a too small a capacity to be a harddisk based player, as it only holds 60 photos. Likely, it is flash based and it is not a filesystem partition locking you out of the OS, but either the OS is on a different chip, or is on the same chip, but inaccessible except to a firmware upgrade program (specific to the device).

Linux on embedded devices, like this one, is not as simple as it is on PCs. Often times, you need to write drivers for hardware, and a loader to even get Linux on the device in the first place. Much more complex then just reformatting a device.