Crestron CCS-UC-CODEC-200

[abq]

Can someone provide more detail on what to do with these units? I have 5 of these units that I purchased off of Ebay at a cheap price.

Yup, I have the same disease! I almost bought a few myself. ...Buy something with vague & time consuming potential, but no clear path forward or critical application. Lucky for both of us that this forum is full of really smart folks, with lots of ideas, and special skills to address the challenging parts (e.g. Fohdeesha is one of our forum's most gifted hacking geniuses, so I assume a lot of folks pressuring him, which he deftly balances with rest of his life & hobbies. ...My major skill is draining the bank account & supporting second hand equipment economy - along with pursuing a few too many never finished projects. Great site (STH) & hobby here!

 

[abq]

Yup, I have the same disease! I almost bought a few myself. ...Buy something with vague & time consuming potential, but no clear path forward or critical application. Lucky for both of us that this forum is full of really smart folks, with lots of ideas, and special skills to address the challenging parts (e.g. Fohdeesha is one of our forum's most gifted hacking geniuses, so I assume a lot of folks pressuring him, which he deftly balances with rest of his life & hobbies. ...My major skill is draining the bank account & supporting second hand equipment economy - along with pursuing a few too many never finished projects. Great site (STH) & hobby here!

Ok, I am compelled to purchase one too now! ...See what this forum does to us? I don't want to miss out on the potential fun & community learning opportunity. Is there an AA for tech surplus addicts?!?

 

[PPC750]

Just a quick question is there any way to get the units to default to using either of the HDMI's out ports? I noticed when I booted an Ubuntu image (wiped the internal SSD and dd'ed a liveCD) it defaulted to using the HDMI 1 port for video output. However I borrowed a Monoprice HDBase-T Exender, so I could install Windows, but I was only able to get video out on the HDBase-T extender.

Granted I didn't let Windows install drivers so perhaps that's why that happened, maybe I should correct that first. I was just wondering if there are any settings in the BIOS I needed to edit to get it to use the HDMI Video Out.

 

[Smedwardd]

I believe you can set the BIOS to use on board video, rather than the PCIE board attached

Edit: I'm wrong

 

[PPC750]

I'll look through the BIOS and see if I can find that option. As for Windows once I coaxed it into updating and getting the drivers, the onboard video worked just fine. I dunno how it slipped my mind to do that, I only remembered when I sat down to ask the question!

 

[PGlover]

I'll look through the BIOS and see if I can find that option. As for Windows once I coaxed it into updating and getting the drivers, the onboard video worked just fine. I dunno how it slipped my mind to do that, I only remembered when I sat down to ask the question!

Let us know what you find out.

 

[PPC750]

Let us know what you find out.

I've got to fiddle with it a bit more, but once I installed the drivers for the Intel HD 4000 in Windows, it didn't seem to matter which setting I enabled (IGPU or PGS I think) the video output was working on both ports once the bios was completed. No luck on getting the BIOS on either (wasn't really expecting it) but my issue was just driver related. I installed Debian 11 without a DE, and with the IGPU set as the default I got Console Output on HDMI 1 without issues.

 

[turbo]

I got one of these units to play with also. Very powerful little boxes! I wanted to document a few things I've learned so far:

• I was unable to reset the Administrator password and successfully login even after doing a factory restore, not sure why exactly
• The "Service" port is Ethernet and is connected to an internal switch of some sort
• The second gigabit RTL chip is also connected to the internal switch
• There are other devices on the board with IPs 10.0.0.2 and 10.0.0.4 that try to open up connections to 10.0.0.1 on TCP ports 49348 and 49350
• Ubuntu treats HDMI1 as the first screen, HDMI2 as the second screen, and the TS port as a third screen by default
• The HDMI ports appear as "always connected" and seem limited to 1920x1080 only
• ESXi v6.7 works fine once you add the NET55_R8 package
• Cannot seem to change the boot device in the BIOS, it always resets itself back to the built-in SSD. Temporary changes work to boot from other devices though
• I managed to get macOS Mojave running, using the TS only - HDMI ports not functional (yet?)

The UEFI BIOS seems buggy, but it works OK in "BIOS" mode with UEFI disabled. I did hunt around a bit to see if there was an updated image out there but I haven't found one yet.

 

[Bbolt]

I got one of these units to play with also. Very powerful little boxes! I wanted to document a few things I've learned so far:

• I was unable to reset the Administrator password and successfully login even after doing a factory restore, not sure why exactly
• The "Service" port is Ethernet and is connected to an internal switch of some sort
• The second gigabit RTL chip is also connected to the internal switch
• There are other devices on the board with IPs 10.0.0.2 and 10.0.0.4 that try to open up connections to 10.0.0.1 on TCP ports 49348 and 49350
• Ubuntu treats HDMI1 as the first screen, HDMI2 as the second screen, and the TS port as a third screen by default
• The HDMI ports appear as "always connected" and seem limited to 1920x1080 only
• ESXi v6.7 works fine once you add the NET55_R8 package
• Cannot seem to change the boot device in the BIOS, it always resets itself back to the built-in SSD. Temporary changes work to boot from other devices though
• I managed to get macOS Mojave running, using the TS only - HDMI ports not functional (yet?)

The UEFI BIOS seems buggy, but it works OK in "BIOS" mode with UEFI disabled. I did hunt around a bit to see if there was an updated image out there but I haven't found one yet.

All the units I have had dead CR2032 (backup) batteries and would reset the BIOS every power cycle.

 

[turbo]

All the units I have had dead CR2032 (backup) batteries and would reset the BIOS every power cycle.

that would make sense, but it remembers all of the other settings OK only the boot device won't stick. not really an issue once you get an OS installed.

so 10.0.0.4 is the touchscreen, and 10.0.0.2 is the Crestron AV board itself, both respond to CTP but don't list any interesting commands, only "VERSION" and "TESTDNS" not sure this is useful for anything but I found it interesting.

the heatsink does a great job, but the heatsink fans on my unit were super loud, so I unplugged 1 and moved 1 fan to the CPU fan header. now it responds to the load/temperature and it's MUCH quieter, pretty much silent even under load.

 

[PGlover]

What are you folks going to use these units for?

 

[aeg]

A few random notes on these.

They are 2" high (not 1U!) and the rack mount bracket mounts it in 2U.

It looks like it would be possible to squeeze in a single 3.5" spindle drive with all the boards still in place, by drilling mounting holes in the top cover -- but not two drives.

My unit came with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB Innodisk SSD.

 

[yeyus]

So i have been messing with this for a while now with no luck. I dont have the touchscreen yet and i think thats holding me back. but if i could just get some help getting into safemode i think i can figure some more stuff out. Currently digging through the registry and editing things to see what crashes it and what does not. Was able to remove the spashscreen with this

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\crestsoft\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
removed
UtsUserMessage
C:\crestron\bin\UtsUserMessage.exe
UtsSplashScreen
c:\crestron\bin\UtsSplashScreen.exe

Was also able to change the login to administrator but with no change.
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\crestsoft\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

DefaultUsername changed from lyncroom to Administrator
shell changed from eshell.exe to C:\Windows\explorer.exe
ShellOrg changed from eshell.exe C:\Windows\explorer.exe
--------after booting they were auto changed back to eshell.exe

And have been digging through the .bat files to see what they are up to but if you change most of them it either does not boot at all or just goes to a blackscreen.

G:\Crestron\bin\RunLMR.bat to G:\Crestron\bin\RunLMRo.bat
boots still no keyboard or change.

Also was able to rename alot of the folders on the 4 partitions but again most would cause no boot or blackscreen. Some would reappear after renaming

Also tried using easybcd to edit the bcd on the drive and force it to safemode. Resulted in no boot.

Seems like EWF is enabled, so all changes you make are only changed in an ramdisk overlay. If you want to persist any changes you make run EWFMGR.exe C: -COMMIT

I've been playing with the original disk image in a kvm VM and I'm trying to bring it out of kiosk mode (most of them seem to be Group Policies - gpedit.msc) to start playing with the custom drivers.

 

[scabskunk]

Seems like EWF is enabled, so all changes you make are only changed in an ramdisk overlay. If you want to persist any changes you make run EWFMGR.exe C: -COMMIT

I've been playing with the original disk image in a kvm VM and I'm trying to bring it out of kiosk mode (most of them seem to be Group Policies - gpedit.msc) to start playing with the custom drivers.

Any chance you could strip the drivers for the touchscreen and other things? forgot to pull them off before i re installed.

 

[yeyus]

@scabskunk I'll look into it.

For now I've been playing with HDMI capture


It's still complaining about some filter library but it seems promising.

It seems that the FPGA board registers as a custom media driver on windows using a driver by an intel acquired company called Omnitek. It looks very custom and we are really lucky that they dropped some demo SDK project with partial sources in the Program Files folder.

My hopes were that HDMI video capture was actually implemented as a network socket in the internal switch but it seems handled through PCIe

 

[yeyus]

Got video capture working:

http://imgur.com/a/GEBijqb

Video source is an Amazon Fire Stick.

Steps:
1. Grab Omnitek drivers (PCI Device 1AA3:*) from original windows distro. You will need the inf and sys files, in my image they were in the Windows Driver Store.

dism /Online /get-drivers /format:table

2. Grab Omnitek folder from Program Files. It contains a sample app and some incomplete source code for such app.
3. Install Omnitek drivers in W10 or whatever version you like.
4. Install VC++ 2008 Redistributable package.
5. Register the OmnitekSourceFilter.dll using regsvr32.exe
6. Open the sample app you pulled from your machine. Profit.

The HDMI capture seems to be very low latency and did not stutter at all. I've to work on the audio and investigating if this video input can be made a generic DirectShow input next.

Has anyone explored how to disable HDMI 2?, right now using the default Intel drivers installed by windows I can't change the default display arrangement in which all 3 (Touch Display, HDMI1 and 2) are all active and the desktop extended. I tried to make HDMI1 and 2 duplicates but I could not.