Re: [Banshee-List] Podsleuth + iPod firmware update

["Aaron Bockover" <abockover novell com>]

Patryk,

This is awesome news. The old way they packaged firmware was incredibly
painful as you saw from my code in ipod-sharp.

For sure we'll add good firmware support to ipod-sharp (and Banshee)
now, using the process you described. Thank you for doing that research.

I'll let you know when the property lands in PodSleuth.

--Aaron


On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 01:32 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2008 12:00 AM, Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com> wrote:
> > Patryk,
> >
> > Awesome!
> 
> Thanks ;)
> 
> > About 1.5 years ago I started writing firmware updating code into
> > ipod-sharp. Most of that code is still useful I hope. I abandoned the
> > effort because Apple changed the way they delivered firmware updates to
> > the iPod and thus made it harder for us to replicate, so if you've
> > solved that new part of the problem, maybe we should start the effort
> > again in ipod-sharp.
> 
> Yes, my code pretty much works now for every model I was able to test
> it except for the Shuffles (I have no idea how to upload firmware
> there as there is no firmware partition and I don't own a Shuffle so
> my testing possibilities are pretty limited).
> 
> > The code I wrote is here:
> > http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/ipod-sharp/src/Firmware/
> 
> Looking at it now, some comments below...
> 
> > Now, maybe Apple completely changed how they package firmware and none
> > of this code is useful anymore. I don't know. It used to be a DMG image
> > with a bunch of raw firmware files in it. My code handled extracting
> > firmwares from the image, among a few other things, in 100% managed
> > code.
> 
> Now it's just a plain zip file with two files inside: a manifest with
> some metadata encoded as plist (we could use that to check already
> downloaded firmware if upgrading from a local copy) and the Firmware-*
> file containing the raw image in the ready to upload state. I believe
> the change was introduced some time after iTunes began to oficially
> support Windows platforms.
> 
> All the gory details of my research can be found here:
> http://code.google.com/p/ipod-update/wiki/UpdateProcess
> 
> While my proof of concept was written in Python (I'm a pythonist for
> living) the description is pretty software-agnostic. The whole process
> is just a matter of doing a http request, parsing some files and
> unpacking twice (once a gzip stream and once a zip archive).
> 
> I'm not sure if I can help with the implementation code (my .net
> experience is limited to some simple university projects I had to do
> some years ago) but I can help with the process (if the above
> description is not clear enough) and work on some UI mockups for
> Banshee.
> 
> > I can easily expose UpdaterFamilyID via PodSleuth, and I'll make that
> > change in svn soon.
> 
> Thanks, that would be a major improvement (no longer need to read the
> XML data in the client).
>