Once I get a wifi adapter, I will perform a portscan on the unit and see what I find.
Thanks, fred555, I appreciate that. Personally I'd prefer to use a wired ethernet adapter rather than a wireless, but if it will let you in using a wifi adapter I'd hope it would also allow use of the wired variety.
During disassembly last night I noticed a 3 pin header on the board (in the lower left of the photo in post #126). Not sure what its used for, but it could be RS232 (Rx, Tx, and GND). Maybe that would be a way to get to a Linux command prompt?
Unfortunately I'm not really into the hardware end of things, and AFAIK I don't even have a computer that has a serial port anymore. But if anyone discovers that is really the way to access the OS on these things, I'd be interested in knowing what you'd need to do to make it work, though I'd be much more likely to buy one if there were a way to make a network connection and access either the live stream, or at least the previously recorded programs from the external drive or memory stick.
I was looking online and found
this device which apparently could be used to switch an external drive between two computers, but you have to push a button to do it. If that device could be switched by sending a command from one of the attached computers then it might be a solution to accessing the files but if I have to walk to where my equipment is and push a button then I might as well just move the USB cable from one device to the other. And anyway I don't know that it's a good idea to just switch the drive between a receiver and a backend computer since it is likely that neither device would have performed a proper unmount on the drive, which I guess could lead to data loss. If the computer were performing the switch it could at least unmount the drive on the computer before switching it back to the receiver, and you could probably set up a script to time the switch to happen when the receiver isn't recording anything, or maybe even use some kind of power control mechanism to kill the power to the receiver before switching the drive. But that seems like a really backwards,
Rube Goldberg way of doing things, and since the device doesn't have any mechanism for computer control it's kind of a moot point.