Hi all,
I recently got hold of one of these OTT M8S boxes and have been banging my head against a wall ever since then. My ultimate objective is to load Openelec onto this and be done. The Android Firmware it comes with is flaky - especially on MPEG2 content (which is amazing considering how well the Pi Zero does with that content).
Trouble is the Fireware that mine came with has no functional recovery partition. Eventually I loaded a new firmware with a recovery using USB_Burning_tool using a stock .img . This image didn't have my WIFI support so I upgraded it using another zip file and the stock recovery method. This went fine, but really I was no nearer my goal since the new recovery firmware has built in signature checking and will only allow firmwares in the same series to be loaded. It seems that this has become a standard feature of all the firmware for these boxes now coming out. So there is no pathway to loading TWRP or Openelec using the standard Fireware - but it won't allow you to break out of the standard firmware signature checking. Deadend !!!
I attempted to dd a functioning TWRP onto the box using shell emulator, but this simply broke the recovery. This suggests that this issue is deeper than just the way the recovery is setup, it suggests that the issue is with the second bootloader (u-boot.ini) which seems to have signature checking built in as well. So no longer can you pick any functioning u-boot.ini file and make a bootable SD-card with Amlogics SDcardMaker.
Fairly locked down altogether, and it would seem that this feature is going to proliferate to all of these boxes since they are all using variants of the same basic Android ROM, which I suspect is issued by AMlogic themselves.
It seems to me that the only way forward is to create alternative ROMS such as Openelec as pure .img files which can be loaded at the raw NAND level using USB_Burning_Tool. None of the developers seem to be addressing this, simply repeating the old approaches which no longer work on these new generation boxes.
A lot of people are thrashing around and bricking their boxes and without a functioning recovery partition these become defacto hard bricks.
So I make a call out for the developers of the unofficial Openelec firmwares to package them as raw .img files rather than OTA zip files which can no longer be sideloaded.
Maybe someone reading this with a functioning Openelec M8S S812 box can do a dd dump and post up a .img file for me to burn into my box. Please.
Stephen
I recently got hold of one of these OTT M8S boxes and have been banging my head against a wall ever since then. My ultimate objective is to load Openelec onto this and be done. The Android Firmware it comes with is flaky - especially on MPEG2 content (which is amazing considering how well the Pi Zero does with that content).
Trouble is the Fireware that mine came with has no functional recovery partition. Eventually I loaded a new firmware with a recovery using USB_Burning_tool using a stock .img . This image didn't have my WIFI support so I upgraded it using another zip file and the stock recovery method. This went fine, but really I was no nearer my goal since the new recovery firmware has built in signature checking and will only allow firmwares in the same series to be loaded. It seems that this has become a standard feature of all the firmware for these boxes now coming out. So there is no pathway to loading TWRP or Openelec using the standard Fireware - but it won't allow you to break out of the standard firmware signature checking. Deadend !!!
I attempted to dd a functioning TWRP onto the box using shell emulator, but this simply broke the recovery. This suggests that this issue is deeper than just the way the recovery is setup, it suggests that the issue is with the second bootloader (u-boot.ini) which seems to have signature checking built in as well. So no longer can you pick any functioning u-boot.ini file and make a bootable SD-card with Amlogics SDcardMaker.
Fairly locked down altogether, and it would seem that this feature is going to proliferate to all of these boxes since they are all using variants of the same basic Android ROM, which I suspect is issued by AMlogic themselves.
It seems to me that the only way forward is to create alternative ROMS such as Openelec as pure .img files which can be loaded at the raw NAND level using USB_Burning_Tool. None of the developers seem to be addressing this, simply repeating the old approaches which no longer work on these new generation boxes.
A lot of people are thrashing around and bricking their boxes and without a functioning recovery partition these become defacto hard bricks.
So I make a call out for the developers of the unofficial Openelec firmwares to package them as raw .img files rather than OTA zip files which can no longer be sideloaded.
Maybe someone reading this with a functioning Openelec M8S S812 box can do a dd dump and post up a .img file for me to burn into my box. Please.
Stephen
via xda-developers http://ift.tt/1Uo53qE
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment