Dear Bhpians, I want to share this tweak with all Renault owners who have the LG MediaNav installed on their cars. I enabled this tweak a few days after I got my car (Kwid), but being the amazing procrastinator that I am, I hesitated posting about it until now.
Anyway, As soon as I got my Kwid, I began to research about the LG unit online. I found out that it is running a heavily skinned version of Windows CE (Not surprising as most OEM's do that anyway). So, I thought that maybe, it might be possible to install a sort of video player to enable video playback on the device, after all the CPU looked more than capable to run 360p or 480p videos. But the problem was, how to access Windows CE that was hidden underneath the OEM and install it.
I found out about Menavrus one day, which is essentially a paid app to enable extra functionality on the MediaNavs but it too was expensive for me, plus I don't have a credit card.
Browsing through many Russian sites and other languages which I have no clue of (thank God for Google Translate), I found out about another software. Medi@Skin, which installs CorePlayer (The Video Player) and a few other softwares. And best of all, it was free, unlike Menavrus. A word of caution: There are a few sites that try to sell Medi@Skin but I think those are false as even Menavrus lists Medi@Skin as Freeware.
Anyway, enough backstory, on with the installation. Requirements for Install -
- LG MediaNav (Running 4.0.3) - Else you need to downgrade
- The Medi@Skin Software
- A Laptop or Desktop to download the file
- 8GB USB 3.0 Pen Drive or even USB 2.0 will do
- A little Patience
You will need to visit the Medi@Skin website to download the software. I am providing it here -
Medi@Skin Download.
Now, before we proceed any further, you need to check your firmware version, the 1st batch of Kwids came with 4.0.3 firmware, however, the newer ones come with 4.0.4, 4.0.5, and so on. Medi@Skin only works with 4.0.3 firmware.
To people who have firmware versions 4.0.4 and up, you will need to downgrade. For that, you will need this file, which I have uploaded to my G. Drive account (I found this after scouring the net for weeks) -
Firmware Downgrade 4.0.3.
Extract the downloaded file. Then, copy it onto a freshly formatted Pen drive, use FAT32, not NTFS or exFAT. Then, insert the pen drive into your MediaNav and boot it up. After a while, the upgrade screen will appear and ask you whether you want to upgrade to 4.0.3 [It says upgrade instead of downgrade, wonder why]. Anyway, accept the prompts and after the downgrade has finished, check your firmware version, you should be on 4.0.3 now.
Now, back to the file we downloaded earlier from Medi@Skin website. You will see two folders. Both of them are essentially the same, however, one of them is for hardcoding the new firmware permanently into the device, while the other is for installing the firmware onto a Pendrive instead. I'm going to be showing you how to install it onto the USB drive instead so that we don't void the warranty on our devices, and the firmware will be installed on the USB drive only.
In Medi@skin_v2_Clé_USB folder, you'll get two sub-folders.
Copy upgrade_root.lgu, CorePlayer, Igo8, Logicel etc. to the
rootof your pen drive. Remember, the Pen Drive must be formatted again to FAT32 for this to work.
After this take the pen drive and insert in MediaNav. Turn MediaNav on, after some time an upgrade screen will appear, install the upgrade. After this, the device will reboot and MediaSkin is now installed on your MediaNav.
After that, all you need to do is just convert the videos you want to watch on your Kwid, or Duster or Lodgy and store them on the videos folder on the Pen Drive. Do keep in mind that the processor is ancient (running @ 533MHz if I remember correctly) and the measly 256 MB RAM (again, IIRC) does little to help playing HD videos smoothly.
I've tested it in various resolutions, upto 1080p (a bit too much but wanted to see how much the system could take), and the best one I found is MP4 at 480p with a 2100 bitrate and audio in an Mp3 container, at 128KBps. However, feel free to experiment. I got tired of converting videos in a while and just stopped.
One thing to note, before starting Medi@Skin, remember to play the IAmuet.mp3 file on the Pen Drive in the stock music app so that videos will have sound in Coreplayer. Otherwise, the radio sound will keep on playing in background.
I haven't uploaded any pictures because I feel that installing Medi@Skin is relatively simple. However, I will be more than happy if requested to do so.
Thank you for reading my 1st guide on Team-BHP. I know it's a bit messy but I will keep updating and clean up my post.