iFunBox Development

We received many complains that iTunes report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading video or song using iFunbox. The cause of this problem is that Apple has special hashing checking in iTunes which is not well handled by iFunbox. We apologize for that and will fix the problem in the next release.

Situation
0. For all iPhones and iPod Touch, iTunes will report “Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring after uploading some media file using iFunbox due to the hashing checking in iTunes.
1. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 1.1.x, the uploaded songs/movies will be recognized by iPod on the device and can be played. In FW 1.1.x, the device doesn’t check the hashing.
2. For iPhones and iPod Touch with FW 2.x.x, the uploaded songs/movies will NOT be recognized due to the hashing checking on the device.
3. For other models of iPods (Classic, Video, Shuffle and etc), iTunes will not ask for restoring and just simply remove the media files uploaded by iFunbox. For devices produced before 2007 (not exactly), the uploaded media files will be recognized and can be played. However for newest devices, the uploaded media files can NOT be played. I guess, it is also due to hashing checking.

Do NOT follow iTunes
Though iTunes report ”Cannot read the content …” and asks for restoring, I believe no one would like to do that. iTunes force you update the firmware along with restoring and after restoring all user data will be delete including installed 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history. Also you will need to jailbreak after restoring.

Rescue the relationship with iTunes.
Here we provide steps to cheat iTunes that the device has been restored by deleting “iTunes_Control” folder. so that iTunes will initialize the media database (iTunesDB). The way we provided here keeps all user data unchanged except songs and movies. 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list, SMS history will be preserved after process. Also you don’t need to jailbreak again.
We test the steps on iPhone 2G, FW1.1.4 and iTunes 8.0. Thanks Gaz, he tested the steps on iPhone 3G and iTunes 7.1.

0. Close iPod application on iPhone, stop music playing.
Close iTunes, You must close iTunes!!! Then open iFunBox.

1. Backup media files. (Optional)
if you don’t care, just skip.

2. Backup contact list and SMS. (Optional)
Though the following steps will not erase those information, I’d like to have those things backuped just in case.
Contact List: //var/mobile/Library/AddressBook
SMS: //var/mobile/Library/SMS

3. Browse the [Raw File System], Delete the folder iTunes_Control Located in “//var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control”

4. Close iFunbox and then open iTunes for setup.
Wait seconds for iTunes searching for the connected iPhone.
Now iTunes will ask you to setup instead of restoring it, after the iTunes_Control folder was deleted.
Choose [Set up as an New Phone] and uncheck all sync options, iTunes will initialize an empty media database. Thus, the iTunes_Control folder and subfolders will be created. Other user data such as 3rd-party apps, data in general storage, contact list and SMS histroy keep unchanged.
Choose [Restore from backup of], the contact list and SMS history will be overwritten to the state as backup.
In this step, my choice is [Set up as an New Phone], then click [Continue]. Uncheck the automatically sync then click [Done].

Then iTunes takes a long time for sync and finally we have iTunes back.

iPods will be connected to computer as a mass-storage disk. However the the mass-storage disk will be disable by iTunes if [Enable Disk Use] option is not checked.

Remember to check the option, so that iFunbox can find the connected iPods.
The option applies to iPod classic, iPod Video and etc. iPod Touch is indeed an iPhone w/o phone module.

iFunBox v0.6.199.35 is released. [ download ]
What’s New:
1. Full Managing Songs and Movies to iPhone and iPod: Uploading, downloading and deleting media clips.
2. Shortcut for Ringtones.
3. Enhanced data transmission engine.
4. Fix compatible problem with iTunes 8.0, no more crash.

Limitations:
1. Media files uploaded by iFunBox will not be recognized by iTunes. iTunes report it cannot read the content and asks to restore.
2. Manually Respring or Reboot is required after uploading media files.
3. Currently iPod Shuffle can not play songs uploaded by iFunBox.
4. For 2.x firmware, media uploading doesn’t work properly. We’re just work on that.

Many users reported iFunBox crashes after iTunes was updated to v8.0. We found the USB communication runtime library (iTunesMobileDevice.dll) was changed which cause iFunBox failure. The problem has been fixed in the newly released iFunBox v0.6.199.35.

More precisely, the memory layout of the structure am_device was extended 105bytes. The structure is used in many fundamental call for communicating with iPhone via USB port. Though the meaning of these addtional bytes is not clear to us, fortunately we don’t need to know that. The structure is created by the runtime library and feeded to other calls.

The updated am_device structure is defined as:
struct am_device {
unsigned char unknown0[16]; /* 0 - zero */
unsigned int device_id; /* 16 */
unsigned int product_id; /* 20 - set to AMD_IPHONE_PRODUCT_ID */
char *serial; /* 24 - set to AMD_IPHONE_SERIAL */
unsigned int unknown1; /* 28 */
unsigned char unknown2[4]; /* 32 */
unsigned int lockdown_conn; /* 36 */
unsigned char unknown3[8]; /* 40 */
unsigned char unknown4[6*16+1]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
unsigned char padding[8]; // + in iTunes 8.0, by iFunbox.dev
};


The most important feature of the newly release iFunBox is uploading songs and movies to iPhone/iPod. This feature now works with iPhone or iPod Touch with FW2.x.x.

Songs and Movies can be uploaded by clicking button [Copy From PC]

After selected media files was transmitted, uploaded songs or movies will be listed in the [File View]

Please remember to Respring the iPhone, so that iPod will refresh the media file list to include the newly uploaded songs and movies, as shown in the program tips. For the first time of transferring, reboot of iPhone is required.

 SysInfo is a nice app to Respring the iPhone or iPod Touch.

After respring, uploaded songs and movies are listed in iPod.

We just got a brand new iPhone 3G and tested. iFunBox works well with the iPhone 3G as a jailed device without any modification of our program. Cheers!! 

The features of file explorer (use iPhone as a portable disk) and backup iTunes managed songs/movies work well with the non-hacked iPhone 3G.

Currently we’re working on uploading songs and movies to iPhone and iPod. We will release the new version soon.

Crash dump file (*.dmp) will appear when the program crashes. Sending us the crash dump can help us improve the i-FunBox.

– iFunBox Dev Team ( ifunbox.dev@gmail.com )

Override the Unicode codepage
The codepage used to convert non-Unicode plain text to Unicode text is obtained with GetACP call by default. The codepage can be overridden by save a DWORD value under
“HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\i-funbox.com\i-FunBox\Preference” with name CodePage.

1. International.
2. Thumbnails for image files and windows executable files.
3. Contact and short message managment.
4. … have no idea ….

iFunBox V0.5.181.30 is released.

Core Feature:
1. Full access to Apple Mobile Device filesystem: copy, move, delete, creation, rename.
2. Map native filesystem (USB mass-storage) for handling iPod series.
3. Optimized multi-thread data transfer engine with task scheduling and prioritizing.
4. Device detection and recognition.
3. Windows Explorer style user interface (Folders Tree, File List, Drag&Drop).

Application Feature:
1. Parse iTunes DB for iPod media file management.
2. General purpose storage.
2. Unicode plain text conversion for EBooks supports.
3. Batch image resizing and cropping for iPhone wallpaper generation.
4. iPhone specification PNG Conversion (CgBI header removal).