Hacking the Streamium

UVwarning writes "I submitted a review to Slashdot about a month ago complaining about various problems with Philips' streamium MCi-200 (an Internet micro hi-fi system). The main gripes being that Philips controls which Internet radio stations you can listen to and that the PC-link software (which is used to serve MP3s from your PC to your Streamium) only runs on Windows. I managed to fix both of these problems by reverse engineering the PC-link protocol and writing my own pc-link server in perl, which can be run on practically any OS, *and* can trick the Streamium into playing any Internet MP3 stream that you want! This is a must-have for any Streamium user. Here is a more detailed article along with the perl script and an outline of the PC-link protocol."

Comments

In IMPERIALIST AMERICA

[Anonymous Coward]

Philips sues *you* and throws *you* in jail!

Seriously, you're going to taste the blade of the DMCA pretty soon. I mean, what if Philips wanted to sell you this new-found freedom for $39.99 in the form of a "Freedom Xpansion Pack(tm)"?

So get your mirrors on, bitches!

Personal use

[zabieru]

I don't know, Philips might be okay with this... It's not like they're making more money from the restrictions, or losing money from his hack, or it's affecting other customers. Microsoft doesn't want modded Xboxes on live because it affects service for others (really people, why does a linux xbox need to be on live? Sure, it's a pain to take the chip out every time, but it's also a pain to lose every other game to a 13 year old with a wallhack). Printer makers don't like toner cartridge hacking because they lose money. But Phillips doesn't have any financial reason to sue the guy... they may do so because they want to control their products, on the other hand.

Re:Personal use

[octalgirl]

I don't know, Philips might be okay with this

But they don't have to be, and that is the problem with the DMCA. here is a perfect example of someone taking a product manufactured by someone else and saying "hey wait a minute, I can do this, this and this" -- and make it better. Make it more fun. The DMCA does not allow for this type of play/inquizitiveness (word?), or experimentation. And that is the problem. People do this all the time, with little things, and big things like electronic products. Like speakers. I know there is no programing involved, but in early days, people would say, 'hey, I want better sound', then plug their stereo into their computer. It was many years before you could actually buy surround sound speakers/sub woofers to go along with your computer. The manufacturer can't be expected to think of everything, and just because they planted the seed, does not give them exclusive rights to all the fruit born of that seed.

I guess I don't see the point

[nizcolas]

Props for sticking it to the man but isn't the Stream/ium just a set of speakers connected to the internet?

What's the difference between this and simply streaming music to your computer, then streaming it out of another set of speakers?

Maybe it's the idea of replacing radio with a true people's medium? Maybe wrenching power away from the media moguls and using the internet as the peoples voice to listen to/stream the music they want? In that case why did you buy the Stream/Ium in the first place? It obviously only connects to Phillips approved content and judging by this statement: " Digital connectivity also enables the Streamium MC-i200's digital connectivity to receive additional services and features from Philips and its partner companies as and when they are offered. Details of available updates for both the Streamium MC-i200 and the FW-i 1000 will be posted on the Philips Audio website, www.audio.philips.com." It sounds like its going to be collecting data about you.

Open?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm... why give your money to a clueless old-skool consumer electronics concern when you can get something that comes out of the box with

• a polished user interface
  
• extensive API accessible through both HTTP and a persistent socket interface
  
• a plugin architecture for your own perl add-ons
  
• active hacker community
  
• full protocol docs published and supported by the manufacturer
  
• damn there's too much to list - just go to the site.
  

Build it yourself.

[mikeophile]

Walmart PC_________$200
AM/FM Tuner Card___$ 20
100 Watt Speakers__$ 50
TV Tuner Card______$ 40
Linux of choice____$free

Total Cost_________$310

What do ya know? Cheaper than the Streamium, yet I can play movies too.

Standards?

[Max Romantschuk]

First of all I'll admit I didn't read the article...

What I did do was start wondering if there are any open standards to do things like this... I've been thinking about making a box at home to serve mp3s and movies, which would then be played at various devices (my desktop PC, my tv-attached laptop etc...)

This might not be quite on topic, but are there open standards for linking devices for serving and playing back media in a user friendly fashion? Sure you can do things like this, but the whole user friendlyness is critical for me, or rather my girlfriend, who won't have any of it unless she can use it too ;)

Sell one for less and pocket the difference

[2nd Post!]

It costs you $310?

Good, sell one to me for $320, and you can keep the difference.

C|Net tells me I can get one for $350. Heck, sell it to me for $330, I'm feeling generous.

Re:This would be sweet if they hacked the slimp3..

[seanadams.com]

Granted, I'm not too sure how much the slimdevices folks would appreciate this, but the two projects seem ripe for marriage.

I've had a few beers so I'm a litle reluctant to reply, but what the hell. Our company is BUILT ON open source. We give you the source, you give us your improvements, together we make a better product for you.

Selling hardware pays our bills, so obviously we're not in this so that people can use our free software in place of the shit that Philips ships. Sorry but we bought a Streamium to evaluate (as well as the Onkyo, Turtle Beach, and Motorola offerings), and all I can say is BIG CONSUMER ELECTRONICS COMPANIES CAN'T DO SOFTWARE FOR BEANS. That's putting it lightly.

So our software is GPL. Anyone can use it. Heck, you don't even have to buy our hardware, you can download the server and try it out using Winamp as a client.

But our software is just part of the experience. When you buy the SLIMP3 you get a high quality client that works great, looks great, and isn't encumbered by any DRM or internet radio restrictions. We listened to our customers and nobody is asking for that. What they are asking for is: a great UI, great performance, support for 500GB mp3 collections, cross-platform support, an awesome web interface, etc etc, and that's what we deliver.

So yes, it's GPL, and we like it that way. How exactly our products are "ripe for marriage" I don't know. Have you seen a Streamium in person?

Nice looking dumb hardware is what we want...

[Rolfje]

The general customer wants nice looking devices which connect to the internet. Philips has "tricked" them into buying this music device which you could build in a single ARM Linux board.

But hey, don't we want nice looking mp3 players? I know I would want my PS2 to play MP3's (which I've bought the Linux kit for... :-) Saves 1 noisy PC.

Post the Perl script everywhere, so we can still have it when Philips sues you ;-)

You don't get it

[dsanfte]

do you? It doesn't seem anybody does...

They are losing something. It's not money, it's not customers... it's control. Sometimes that's more important than either of the others.

This might actually be good for Philips

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

My dad works for Philips, and as long as I can remember, they've been putting out products with reasonable or good quality and ofttimes a very nice technological edge, only to have them fucked up by some marketing droid imposing rediculous limitations on them.
Hell, that the software is put out only for windows I can understand: Philips has a pretty good relation to microsoft and has, afaik, never even bothered to look at alternatives, but I just can't understand why they limit the Internet-radio part to just a few 'philips-certified' stations. No brainer!
It's probably something to do with philips large interests in media groups (they have large stocks in some recording companies, and also in Vivendi, which does this kind of stuff too I think) and some marketing guy thinking this is a smart way to combine the two. Anyway, to make my point, someone making this thing useable, and removing stupid restrictings on it might actually make it *interesting* for consumers.

Question is

[forgoil]

1. Should Phillips fight this as much as they can?
2. Should Phillips welcome it as added value for customers?
3. Should Phillips start to release just the hardware and specs, and simply let other people do their software work for free?

Interesting business idea if nothing else, sucker others into working for you without having to pay them, and then feed them that it is because of their freedom...

Re:Can this really be considered a "hack"?

[UVwarning]

Is it a hack? It allows you to listen to streams that you are not supposed to. I'd say that's a hack. Is it the product of reverse-engineering? Of course it is. I don't quite understand what you are getting at with that google link of yours. Yes, certainly XML is well documented and publicly available, but XML is not the protocol. The protocol only *uses* XML. There *is* such a thing as something being easy to reverse-engineer, and in this case it was fairly easy for me to, but the results are sweet. I can finally listen to BassDrive on my sterio. Yay!

Re:Could you explain

[Max Romantschuk]

...why do you need to stream something to another PC? If you have a LAN, you can play any file from wherever you want, no?

Files, yes. Content, including metadata about authors, styles and such: no. Just streaming files never ends up being user frienly enough. For you and me it's sufficient to locate a file. For someone else the ability to just "play movie" or "find rock music" is worth much more than a geek could possibly imagine ;)

--rant=true

[orthogonal]

Somebody explain to me what genius at Phillips thought it would be a competitive advantage to control the stream a customer could listen to, and why that's an advantage.

Oh. Advantage. Righto. Gotcha. Phillips thought, gee, we can force users to listen to only these channels, and then we can get those channels to pay us with money from the additional ad revenue they can get by claiming all those captive ears.

Except. I'd never buy, for instance, a GE TV that would only tune in NBC, the network owned by GE. In fact, I'd be so offended by that idea, I'd make a point not to buy GE or watch NBC. (Let me emphasize that GE does not sell an NBC-only TV or tuner, as far as I know.)

I'm in the market for something like a Streamium. But now I definitely won't buy Phillip's Streamium product, and I'll be very disinclined to buy any Phillips products, because I now know they don't want customers, they want customer ears to sell to "strategic partners".

In fact, I'll be very disinclined to buy anything without an open specification.

I bought an Archos Jukebox. It's great hardware. It's built-in firmware is definitely substandard software. An open source replacement, Rockbox, is an order of magnitude faster, and far far more configurable.

But I can't use the open source replacement, because Archos won't release its specification for my model of Archos. (I'll be able to use it soon, thanks to some remarkable reverse engineering by the Rockbox team.)

I have a simple proposition for hardware manufacturers: I'll buy what I can use as I wish to use it. I won't buy your product to become a commodity you can sell to your partners. You want to profit, manufacturers? Sell an open specification product. Don't try to sell me to advertisers.

Advertising?

[Simon Brooke]

I quote from http://www.audio.philips.com/news_press/PR_MC-i200 _080102.asp, third paragraph:

Via broadband Internet access, the Streamium MC-i200 connects to the huge number of radio stations currently online

If the box won't connect to the 'huge range... currently on line', but only a smaller, Philips authorised, range, then that's false advertising, which, in Europe, anyway, is illegal. So before wasting time hacking the box it would be worth dropping a line to the Advertising Standards Authority or your national equivalent, or to your local Trading Standards office.

Remember, as Lessig points out, the law is also code, and has APIs you can use.