Transferring files over FTP/HTTP
Once you have enabled telnet access on your media player, there are a few neat things you can do. One is transferring files from remote computers without going through the whole "disconnect Mvix from TV, connect to PC using USB, copy files, disconnect from PC, connect to TV" thing. As part of the firmware package, you have a command called wget. This is a poor mans copy of the "real" wget command found on many unix systems. Basically it’s for Web GETting files, although it can be used for both HTTP and FTP.
For this to work, you need a local storage on the Mvix, either an internal hard drive or something writeable connected to the USB port. This is where we will copy our files so that the GUI will be able to show them to us later on. In this example I’ve used an internal hard drive. The drive has to have ext3 as the file system, not NTFS. The firmware only has read-only support for NTFS, but from 1.1.25 it has full read/write support for ext3.
Then simply use the built-in command wget to fetch files from a web or ftp server. E.g.
way:~# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 6986 6986 0 100% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part 1283855840 215820 268988340 0% /tmp/ide/part1
Our internal drive is here /tmp/ide/part1, so we’ll store our files there.
way:~# cd /tmp/ide/part1/
way:/tmp/ide/part1# wget http://www.mvixusa.com/images/logo.jpg
Connecting to www.mvixusa.com[72.29.86.148]:80
logo.jpg 100% |*****************************| 6806 00:00 ETA
way:/tmp/ide/part1# wget ftp://ftp:ftp@ftp.uio.no/pub/ls-lR.gz
Connecting to ftp.uio.no[158.36.2.10]:21
ls-lR.gz 100% |*****************************| 4487 KB 00:00 ETA
Very handy.
Note however, that there are file size limitations here. The built-in wget command will not fetch files of more than 2^32 (4294967296) bytes over ftp. Trying to get larger files will result in the error message wget: SIZE value is garbage.
The same thing is most likely the case for http as well. And in addition to this, your web server may or may not handle files of more than either 2Gb or 4Gb depending on compilation options. Stock Apache 2.0.55 on 64-bit Ubuntu Edgy will happily serve you larger files though.
Once you’ve mastered this however, you may want to NFS mount external shares onto your media player as well.
