Welcome to the forum, I look forward to your question and ideas.

I know that you can install dd-wrt into nearly all of the WRT series and configure them as wireless repeaters, but it is not possible to install dd-wrt on that router. I recommend checking tomatoe, openwrt and other firmware to see if any have support for your router and can enable the repeater setup.

The flash medium can overheat and loose data including the connectivity data, it will only make it completely unusable if the head causing physical damage else it will be a temporary problem.

Can you please share the error message that you are receiving from the bootloader.

On another note, I am encouraged by the amount of research and work you are doing. If you get this working I highly recommend documenting it on a wiki so others can learn from you. having a stable customized persistent gaming medium that can be used on various machines would definitely interest many people.

There are many posts online about making a non-persistent live ISB image, one that references many good materials is at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1980512 . That will allow you to getup writable space on the usb stick.

The lack of rebooting could be due to the usb device overheating, as the flash media on a usb stick gets very hot after a few read/write operations, this is why it is not recommended to use a non-persistent image let alone try to play games from the usb stick.

If you wish to manually locate video files in a directory you can use the file utility which outputs the file type based upon the mime information in the first few lines of the file, such as.

ls -tr|xargs file|grep Flash|cut -d " " -f 1

Which will use the file utility to show the file types for all files in your directory, then grep the flash videos and it uses cut to parse out only the filename.

Have you tried using youtube-dl from the CLI to download the videos?

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/