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: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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