Keychain Photo Viewer...

English Applications
1

Hi All,

I bought 2 small keychain photo viewers for my 2 little kids, thinking they would be fun, but not realizing that they would be so M$-Windows-centric.

Anyway, I can’t seem to access them via linux to store files (photos) for viewing, even though I tried using the bundled software with WINE.

Here is one device:

COBY - Digital Photo Keychain

…and here is another:

Amazon.com: Shift3 Digital Photo Keychain: Sports & Outdoors

Any ideas how to get these functional in linux?? Or should I just quit before I lose too much time…???

Thanks.

D.

2

My wife got this exact one for Christmas last year, and I was unsuccessful in ever getting it to work in linux. I gave up and now use a Virtualbox running XP to transfer pictures to it.

I did find a site where some hacker was able to use it as a 2nd monitor for his linux box by modifying the firmware:

Sprites mods - Use a cheap digital photoframe as a second display for your PC - Introduction

You can download his firmware from his site and it seems to be able to transfer files back and forth, but I never tried it.

Good luck.

3

> Any ideas how to get these functional in linux?? Or should I just quit
> before I lose too much time…???

i guess that means when you plug them in (USB?) nothing happens, at
all…if yes, is that normal for your system, or does it usually pop
up a what-do-you-wanna-do dialog?

you know how to open a terminal and become root? (if not ask before
proceeding, orherwise) become root and BEFORE you plug in on the
devices this at the command line:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb

then plug in one, issue the same line again and see if something was
added…

if so, just treat that new thing like any other USB stick (i GUESS!!)
and copy your photos to it…then the devices built in software should
find and be able to show it…

HOWEVER, read my standard disclaimer first: http://tinyurl.com/6aagco

AND, be advised you may turn the photo viewer into a brick, whereas
i’ve at looked the words on both of those web sites you gave and see
ZERO warning that MS-Windows is required…so, you can use that to
get your money back…if you wish…

–
palladium

4

I’ve only had mine for a few hours. When I plug it in I see an iso9660 file system of 362k that contains Photoviewer.exe and .zip file as well as an Autorun.ini and two other ini files.

I dd’ed off the data from the entire flash and there was exactly 8MiB of data. The first 362K is ISO and there are some sections that look like bitmaps and others that could be display program or compressed images.

My bet is that the Photoviewer.exe program puts data after it’s image on the flash and writes out a structure describing the data onto the flash.

I bet it’s something like a 72 x 72 pixel display with 24 or 32 bit colour. The images are likely stored uncompressed on flash so that cheap circuitry can be used to display it.

What would be useful is to experiment by storing black and white images on it and comparing the dd images to see what changes.