Okay, so back to the "is there a better way to do this", the answer is probably "yes".

On startup, the Hijack kernel looks for these files, and executes ONLY the first one it finds:

/sbin/hijack
/sbin/init
/etc/init
/bin/init

Perhaps whatever it is that you are trying to do can be done by replacing "init" with your own (eg. /sbin/hijack), which does whatever and then invokes the "real" /sbin/init

This is usually a better method than trying to replace the player binary, and I had just assumed you have already tried it. n'est-ce pas?

Cheers