Root Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 Version

[jenneh]

@Walter Bishop I appreciate you sharing this. I had heard some chatter about this too on a podcast i listen to and have saved somewhere. I appreciate any and all breadcrumbz.

I was able to pull all the shield's partitions from a fully installed system and have begun mapping it out, i started with 9.0 to help with building a rom and backing up proprietary apks. I will release these somewhere later and pick up my research with the uboot later.

I'm currently really invested in my modding windows isos thread, finishing mapping out the windows system (may take a couple weeks)but when done i will be back to share some things for the shield

 

[ajolly]

upscaling gets disabled because bootloader is unlocked. thats what i seen on nvidia 8.2.3 os with bootloader unlocked at upscaling section, i had to lock the bootloader and reset user data.

Without AI upscaling there seems little reason to use a shield over other devices. The s922x devices are cheaper and faster.

Edit: Some people might have gotten it working? https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/...scaling-as-ai-enhanced.4171815/#post-87575413

 

[ckf92]

hello, after root, is there a way to display 1920x1080, YUV 4:4:4 10bit Rec709 ??

thank you in advance for help.

 

[jenneh]

@ckf92 is there an app that uses that display, or could you explain to me better a method to test for you?

Spoiler: linux boot image tool found by noob

Attention Everyone, I have an Announcement~!

It took a dang year but I finally figured out how to get the kernel and the ramdisk files from the boot.img. I had to use ubuntu to get it to work. Here's a visual for anyone interested

EDIT THERE'S A WINDOWS TOOL SEE THE SHARE FROM RENATE BELOW

boot.img tool:

bootimg.zip

drive.google.com

I specifically used the premade ubuntu machine in the comments of this thread

Installing Ubuntu With a GUI + WSL2 Upgrade - Windows Subsystem For Linux + Premade Ubuntu Virtual Machines (and more!)

Hello Friends~! I decided to write out a step by step guide to install WSL - Windows Subsystem for Linux, with an Ubuntu Distro, and integrated GUI using Xserver. As well as how to update WSL to WSL2. Open Powershell as Admin, then paste: wsl...

forum.xda-developers.com

Hopefully if that one stupid step was holding anyone else up from trying to make a Real Rom, this will help them get by.

I posted the extracted system text files, apks and the kernel and ramdisk from both the stock and dev 8.2.3 firmware on the COMMUNITY EDITION section of this Guide.

2015, 2017, & 2019 Nvidia Shield TV Firmware Repo & Source Code Repo

Normal Users seeking only Backup Stock Copies should use the Stock Recovery Images Below. AI Upscaling Works. Using the Developer Only Rooted (Full Read Write) Images will break AI upscaling [/SPOILER] [/SPOILER] [/SPOILER]...

forum.xda-developers.com

GitHub - topjohnwu/Magisk: The Magic Mask for Android

The Magic Mask for Android. Contribute to topjohnwu/Magisk development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

For later: The readme shows how to build Magisk into the rom using android studio

Right now the main goal is get su while keeping AI upscaling.

The idea here is to either get su on the STOCK image (as the su binaries are absent on stock), which would require repacking the system.img with the su binaries from the DEV image but would also require modifying the boot.img.. OR get the dependencies needed from the STOCK image for the AI Upscaler pushed onto the DEV image which would only involve an adb push command, but however long it takes to research the dependencies. Whichever is achieved first.

So as you can see we have a zimage file which is peculiar as the shield is 64 bit arch and according to this link zimages are typically associated with 32 bit

/arm64/Image to zImage or boot.img

Hello everyone I have been trying to figure out how to make my android kernel a zImage or boot.img. I tried to figure it out with no luck. I was told that zImage isnt possible for my device becaus...

stackoverflow.com

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/how-to-obtain-image-from-zimage-824499/

"zimage is a self extracting gzip compressed image, you might be able to decompress it by finding the starting offset of the data in the file"

Ask and the Universe Provides, @Renate shared a windows tool that does the same thing Better!! Finally finding real tools

ImgUtil

A better tool for extracting the boot.img using windows (thank god)
Found from here:

Boot image unpack MTK bootloop

Looking out for help I need to edit the boot.img but my problem is that every time i unpack the img and repack it the phone doesnt boot anymore (even w/o modifyng the boot.img only unpacking and repacking) it enters into a bootloop is this bcs...

forum.xda-developers.com

 

[jenneh]

@ajolly Thank You for sharing this magisk module. I saw it when ya said it, just didn't have time to test.

So I tested it yesterday, and I think it worked?

That is on the dev rooted 9.0 firmware from here (8.2.3 didn't work for me, at least with zygisk it got stuck):

2015, 2017, & 2019 Nvidia Shield TV Firmware Repo & Source Code Repo

Normal Users seeking only Backup Stock Copies should use the Stock Recovery Images Below. AI Upscaling Works. Using the Developer Only Rooted (Full Read Write) Images will break AI upscaling [/SPOILER] [/SPOILER] [/SPOILER]...

forum.xda-developers.com

It no longer says the bootloader is unlocked and yt videos are looking super good. I just don't use my shield for anything other than learning, so idk for sure if it is.

Can someone please test this and verify?

I put the instructions up on reddit so we can get some more eyes on it and maybe find out sooner

 

[Electrified Bill]

Greetings. I successfully followed the instructions and rooted my shield. The "Shield Storage Access" which has "Transfer files over network" is missing and thus I cannot hook up to my Synology NAS. What can I do?

 

[jenneh]

Greetings. I successfully followed the instructions and rooted my shield. The "Shield Storage Access" which has "Transfer files over network" is missing and thus I cannot hook up to my Synology NAS. What can I do?

this may be due to the safetynet module which is kinda silly I will see what can be done after work Thank You for testing, I'll let you know what I find later. The safetynet even disables some adb settings.

 

[jenneh]

@Electrified Bill Can you turn the module off and reboot and see if it corrects the issue? that way i know if it is safetynet or the rooted firmware?

 

[Electrified Bill]

this may be due to the safetynet module which is kinda silly I will see what can be done after work Thank You for testing, I'll let you know what I find later. The safetynet even disables some adb settings.

I don't have safety net module installed, only Magisk. Should I?

 

[jenneh]

I don't have safety net module installed, only Magisk. Should I?

In magisk I mean, if you hit that puzzle piece and turn off safetynet in it it

 

[Electrified Bill]

In magisk I mean, if you hit that puzzle piece and turn off safetynet in it it

Yes that's what I did. There are no modules installed.

 

[jenneh]

Yes that's what I did. There are no modules installed.

Oh okay thank you so that's a problem with the root firmware I'll look into it later today

 

[jenneh]

@Electrified Bill again I really thank you for taking the time, I am trying to recreate your problem on the rooted firmware, I do not have such a fancy and neat looking device so I am doing my best to just try to mock setup a network transfer. I am not sure if this is where you were trying from, but I was able to access the network transfer settings from going into Settings on the shield> Device Preferences> Storage & reset > Transfer files over network and the shield allowed me to setup a network, I just don't have anything to test with.

If that worked for you, you could then install the magisk module to test the AI Upscaling fix, the instructions for installing the module are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidiashield/comments/z4fuo3
And again if it works maybe I can learn how to make the network storage a shortcut on the home screen for the rom?

 

[Electrified Bill]

I can't get that far.

 

[jenneh]

I can't get that far.

This is perplexing. I will research it now, the only thing I have done on top of just installing magisk and the 9.0.0 firmware, is I enabled developer options in settings. Not sure if that would help? But I will look around now

 

[jenneh]

@Electrified Bill Oh and I have

network debugging turned on

 

[jenneh]

This is some sort of known issue ? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforc...34/shield-experience-upgrade-90-hotfix-image/ which they hotfixed like 5 days before releasing the 9.0.0 firmware on Gameworks it seems, so I am going to try to upgrade the rooted version up to 9.1 from the in the shield to see if it keeps read write access and whatnot and maybe that would work better? Cause they are slacking on releasing 9.1 on gameworks.

edit my shield is still on 9.0 but it looks different than last night and the upgrade option is gone. Going to reflash mine to see if I can trigger it again and if so if it will actually install 9.1 on root

erased all partitions, and reinstalled 9.0, was unable to recreate the problem, for me the network transfer option is there?

The 9.1 upgrade isn't so now I am going to reinstall magisk and the safetynet module to see if that is what triggered the upgrade for the rooted image for me before --edit did not work

 

[jenneh]

Spoiler: 9.1 PROGRESS

I was able to trick the system to let me download the 9.1 firmware on a rooted image!!

I achieved this by running these commands

adb root
adb disable-verity
adb reboot
adb root
adb remount
adb push build.prop /system

All I did was I unzipped the STOCK system image and I took the STOCK build.prop and pushed it into the DEV image and YAY

Idk if installed this way, ontop of Root, if it will maintain root. Im almost 100 percent certain the downloaded version is stock, but whether or not it will build stock too is another question

It resulted in a crash with a screen I hadn't seen before. I at least now have the 9.1 image saved on my shield and maybe someone can help me figure out how to pull it off or I will figure it out eventually.

Tomorrow I'll use TWRP to flash the root build.prop back over and see what can be done

 

[Electrified Bill]

This is some sort of known issue ? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforc...34/shield-experience-upgrade-90-hotfix-image/ which they hotfixed like 5 days before releasing the 9.0.0 firmware on Gameworks it seems, so I am going to try to upgrade the rooted version up to 9.1 from the in the shield to see if it keeps read write access and whatnot and maybe that would work better? Cause they are slacking on releasing 9.1 on gameworks.

edit my shield is still on 9.0 but it looks different than last night and the upgrade option is gone. Going to reflash mine to see if I can trigger it again and if so if it will actually install 9.1 on root

erased all partitions, and reinstalled 9.0, was unable to recreate the problem, for me the network transfer option is there?

The 9.1 upgrade isn't so now I am going to reinstall magisk and the safetynet module to see if that is what triggered the upgrade for the rooted image for me before --edit did not work

Mine says version 10. Is that the problem?

 

[jenneh]

Mine says version 10. Is that the problem?

Try this one https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1KpCK5xlUmIVo3vhCR-hJzV02UPLMzB/view it's the 9.0