Compaq's PJB-100 MP3 Player Open-Sourced

spludge writes: "Remember the PJB-100? The portable 4.6 gig hard-drive MP3 player -- the one that did not have support for Linux? Compaq just released all the code to communicate and control it under the GPL! All the code and documentation is available for linux and for windows. Read about the details and what you'll need online. Lots of information about how the PJB works and how to communicate with it via USB."

Comments

Re:Wave of the Future

[Gerv]

"The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" - The Bible, 1 Timothy 6:10, NIV

The original source actually says something quite different - the love of money is the problem, and it's only a root (there are plenty more ;-), and not of all evil, but all kinds.

Kind of changes the meaning a lot from the misquoted version, doesn't it?

Gerv

Firmware of Software lock???

[Cheerio Boy]

From the PJB FAQ:

Q: I want to copy the MP3s from my PJB-100 back to my PC. How do I do that? A: You cannot. To ensure that the PJB-100 complies with the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), It is not possible to retrieve the MP3 files from the PJB-100. You should physically posess each CD that you transfer to the PJB-100, or have rights to the material you download from the Internet.

Does anybody know if this is a firmware limitation or a software one?
(If it's firmware I can't imagine the firmware staying un-hacked for long to remove it as it's the biggest "suck" feature on this box.)


The Tick - "Spoon!"

Re:Wave of the Future

[DeepDarkSky]

Right, companies are amoral. They care only about the bottom line (i.e. making money), so unless you believe in the adage that "money is the root of all evil", companies are not inherently evil.

More and more companies will open source their products, and the Open Source community can point to it as a sign of victory. But I'm not sure that it would be because of the reason that the Open Source community wants, or maybe I'm just being naive, a very good possibility.

The Open Source movement is very much like the Patent system in some ways. It begins as a great idea and then the companies start poking at it, using it, "enhancing" it, then you end up with something you are not quite sure about.

Companies may now be embracing Open Source not because it is superior philosophically or technically, but it's just better PR and good business. So in the end, it's always about the bottom line of the company. It's not about the users or innovators. It's about companies' bottom lines. And if it happens to be better for users and be good business as well, great!

So what I'm getting at is, what is the spirit of Open Source anyway? Is it to grow to a point where the companies can use it as a selling point to improve their bottom line? Or is it some other ideal? Or more likely, maybe it's somewhere in between?

Re:Do I have to Rip?

[MitchL]

grumble... this issue again.

You have *ALWAYS* been able to just upload the MP3s you have. You don't *HAVE* to use the original CDs, but it sure is convenient if you do have them. (The included Jukebox Manager rips, encodes, and transfers in one step... that's what the documentation is trying to say).

One reason to use the Jukebox Manager is it includes Fraunhofer's best encoder. I re-ripped everything I had when I got my PJB working the first time, but the other encoders have improved in the past few years as well.

If you have a bunch of MP3s, just press the "Add stored tracks" button (4th from the left) and point it at the files to upload.

This SDK is for the part of the code that does that. You wouldn't have had to re-rip your hundreds of CDs ever... not even if you had the first PJB.

Someone _must_ fix that web site it seems!

/Mitch.

Re:Cool, but it's $800

[whoop]

Considering people here refuse to by a Tivo for $400 until it has ethernet, firewire, steering wheel, rocket boosters, and an A&W Root Beer dispenser, how would someone here buy a device for so much when all it does is play MP3s?

Too bad it's expensive, and output-limited

[Christopher B. Brown]

It's well and nice to have this release; it has two significant problems:

• $800 is rather expensive.

  Hopefully competition and time will bring the cost, and thus, the price, down.

• It's inflexible in what output is permitted.

  I find it rather useful that my Diamond Rio can be treated as a 64MB "silicon disk" via use of the SnowBlind RIO utility , rio .

  In contrast, according to the PjBox FAQ , there's no reasonable way of getting digital data off the unit.

  Ignoring, of course, the notion of encoding other sorts of data into MP3, and then doing a modem-like demodulation of that back into digital data, which would take additional hardware and the entertainment of building a suitable error-correcting protocol that can cope with there being no feedback from PC back to MP3 player.

Misleading headline

[jesser]

The player itself isn't being open-sourced; just the drivers to upload songs to the player. Not that it makes sense to expect the company to "open-source" its hardware and the software that does simple things like "play" and "pause"; it looks like they open-sourced the right parts.

Quoting the linked href="http://bboard.mp3.com/mp3/ubb/Forum5/HTML/00 1491.html">article:

There isn't anything in there for hacking firmware. The firmware will remain proprietary, since much of it is under license from other people.

In addition, it also sounds like they didn't open-source the whole thing:

In the true spirit of the Open Source world, this kit doesn't contain a Linux Jukebox Manager, but it does contain what you'll need to get started and write your own.

But that's probably good, because it means an interface can be written between existing jukebox managers (are those the same as playlists?) and this program, allowing the same programs to be used with competing mp3 players.

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