Rockbox Replaces Archos Firmware

bagder writes: "The guys in the Rockbox project have just released the first working firmware replacement for the Archos portable hard disk-based MP3-players. The software is all GPL. Every tiny bit was reverse engineered, disassembled and then re-written from scratch. You can go download your own firmware right now!"

Comments

The question is...

[neksys]

Is that legal? I mean, I'd just hate to see something like that challenged under the DMCA in all its ridiculousness. Any thoughts or ideas?

Re:The question is...

[Bj�rn Stenberg]

I would say we are in the green. We are not voilating anyone's copyright and we are not circumventing any copy protection scheme.

This has been a big point for me from the beginning. Some people wanted us to distribute patched versions of the original firmware (language fixes, charset fixes etc), but that would have violated Archos' copyright so we never did that.

Re:The question is...

[Bj�rn Stenberg]

Don't confuse the terms.

Reverse engineering means examining a product to find out how it works. Disassembling the firmware is merely one tool used in that examination. Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers are other tools we have used.

We have written every single byte of the Rockbox firmware. But we could not have written the software without first researching how the hardware was put together, i.e. reverse engineer it.

All of this is completely legal.

If you define "from scratch" as writing software without first researching the surrounding interfaces, then no software has ever been written from scratch.

Re:But does it play ogg? not yet

[nucal]

From the FAQ

Q17. I don't see you mentioning ogg files on your list of ideas. What about supporting those?

A17. At the current time we belive this is not very likely (though we are not completely closing out this possibility). The Micronas chip (MAS3507) decoder in the archos does not natively support ogg decoding and there is very little program space in the player to implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software decoder as part of the RockBox firmware. However, as much as we love our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is not fully sufficent for this need (Once again, this is not a definative no. The world is full of brilliant people. We just aren't hunting down all the ones not already involved with the project right this instant).

Re:DCMA?

[rusty0101]

It may be reverse engineering, but unless I miss my guesse, that will not be a problem as far as the DMCA is concerned, as what was reverse engineered was not a means of retaining secure control of a media product. What was reverse engineered was the means of using a product that does not have access controls built into it.

There may be UCITA or EULA violations involved, however I don't expect that the people at Archos are interested in persuing that at this time. I personally don't think they want to be on the loosing side of a court battle over either EULA or UCITA.

Then again, IANAL.

-Rusty

kudos!

[meatspray]

just tried the mod out, works great on my Studio 20, of course the UI has quite a bit till it's up to the current archos build, but it's good to see someone making progress.

the cool thing about these players it you don't have to actually flash the rom, they boot off of the internal rom for a second and immediately look for a file in the root for updates, if the file's not there they just continue to boot from hardware.

Nope

[Arker]

Isn't there some sort of torque problem that needs to be addressed with these hard drive-based devices? Have they engineered the things so that they don't twitch in your backpack?

Actually if you understood elementary physics you'd not have asked that. The platters are gyros, the effect is not a twitch, but actually a slight resistance to being moved. They do, of course, 'twitch' very slightly when the power is turned on.

The real problem is that it's difficult to make the other parts move as close to those platters as they need to, without being so close they 'crash' into the platters when you bump something.

Re:What exactly is the big deal?

[gehrehmee]

I can't speak for the original poster, but I feel dirty when I have to use WMA instead of Ogg.

Re:What exactly is the big deal?

[Raul Acevedo]

The big deal is new features like no pause between songs, mid-song resume, and other things. Archos will likely not ever support most, if not all, of those things.

From the FAQ (also on the main page):

Ok, forget about reality, what could we do with this?

• All those simple mp3-play features we sometimes miss:
  • No pause between songs
  • Mid-song resume
  • Mid-playlist resume
  • No-scan playlists
  • Unlimited playlist size
  • Autobuild playlists (such as "all songs in this directory tree")
  • Auto-continue play in the next directory
  • Current folder and all sub-folder random play
  • Full disk random play
  • REAL random (if press back it goes to the previous song that was played)
  • Multi song queue (folder queue)
• Faster scroll speed
• Archos Recorder support. Most of the hardware is the same, but the display and some other things differ.
• All kinds of cool features done from the wire remote control, including controlling your Archos from your car radio (req hw mod)
• Ogg Vorbis support [unverified: the MAS is somewhat programmable, but enough?]
• Support for megabass switch (req hw mod) [unverified: I just saw the DAC docs shows how to do it switchable. we need a free port pin to be able to switch]
• Player control via USB [unverified]
• Memory expansion? [doubtful: the current DRAM chip only has 10 address lines. we'd have to pull off one heck of a hw mod to expand that]

whoa whoa WHOA! slow down!

[Lord Omlette]

Slow down there big boy! Not a single one of those has actually been implemented! Calling this thing v1.0 is really misleading. These guys are like Microsoft, yeah, they got 1.0 out the door, call me when they get 3.11 for Workgroups, k?

They complain about the shuffle. Dandy, everyone knows that no matter how good an Archos product is, the shuffle is fucking ridiculous. Archos wouldn't know what random is if random bit them in the bloody ass. But Rockbox doesn't even have a shuffle feature yet! And if they do, it's not mentioned in the release notes or available via the menu.

I'm sure these guys will do something great with this project, but call me when they add even one of the features on that list.

Costs - was:Mirror (just in case)

[rusty0101]

You will have to look pretty hard for a jukbox6000, I don't think they are on the market any more. Check E-bay. Considering one of it's capabilities is a 6G USB hard drive, street value is proably under $200 now.

My recollection is that I saw a Studio, or Recorder version with a 20G drive for approx $350 last month at either Micro Center, or CompUSA. BestBuy currently has the Archos Jukbox Recorder 20, listed at $319 (my purchase price was listed at $299 when I put it in my cart) URL is http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11101124&m=488 &cat=538&scat=539

Prices apparently have come down. BestBuy also has the recorder in a 10G capacity, so you might find that workable instead. Price given for that is $259. Free shipping on all portable mp3 players.

Then again, I have relatives who either do or have worked for BestBuy. If you can find a better price somewhere else, and I think you probably can, go get it at the better price.

-Rusty

Re:Reverse Engineering == trouble

[Erasmus Darwin]

"I smell another bnetd."

I don't. Since Archos is selling the hardware, it's doubtful that it's worth the time and effort to pursue a claim. In the bnetd case, on the other hand, people were using an off-shoot of the software to play pirated copies of the Warcraft 3 beta.

Furthermore, this project has nothing to do with bypassing a copy protection device. That's the major part of the DMCA that most people seem to be worried about, and it just doesn't apply. Even better, the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.

Re:whoa whoa WHOA! slow down!

[NeMon'ess]

I understand your frustration with how austere the features are now. Consider what they are trying to do, however. Their idea of 1.0 is to make it work, bug free, and at least play some mp3s. That in itself is a huge accomplishment. Sure 2.0 will be the version that everyone loves. 3.0 will have everything but the kitchen sink (and perhaps vorbis). I think we should commend what an accomplishment its been just to get this far. They just baked a cake, and now its time to frost/decorate it. They just cooked roast beef, now pour on the gravy. Pick your analogy, or suggest your own.

Re:What exactly is the big deal?

[Nugget]

Yeah, the really big deal is that the stock firmware in the Archos is so abysmally crappy as to make the unit nearly unusable. It's tragically full of quirks and bugs and limitations.

As an Archos 20 owner I find this project immensely encouraging and hope that it will soon be in a position to make this Archos unit of mine desirable. As it stands, I hardly use the thing because it's so frustrating.

To quote from my epinions review:

The unit is not without its frustrations, though. For instance, the only way to shuffle tracks in different directories is to create a playlist using the supplied Windows software. However, a playlist is limited to just 999 tracks. With 20Gb of space, 999 seems like a very short-sighted limit for playlisting. The first thing I wanted to do with the unit was to create an "all tracks" playlist in order to shuffle all the tracks. Can't be done. One positive note: The playlists are simply text files, one filename per line with relative pathing. A soon as I figured that out, I ditched the visually-appealing but typically unstable windows MusicMatch software supplied with the unit.

The front-panel user interface is even worse. You can tell this thing was designed by the programmers. Even though it does what it needs, the designers seemed to choose the least obvious, most cumbersome route to each feature. The insanity of having to press right and left on the navigation disk to scroll up and down through the setup menus is just the beginning.

Re:Arbitrary formats

[Bj�rn Stenberg]

We can play any format if only we can write code for the DSP to decode it. The MAS 3507 (and 3587) are generic DSPs that simply have MP3 codecs in ROM. We can download new codecs in them and I'm the first to hooray if we can get OGG or FLAC or anything into these DSPs.

Unfortunately, we have no docs or tools for writing new MAS DSP code and Intermetall is very secretive about it. If anyone can help, please get in touch!

The 12 MHz SH7034 CPU is unfortunately much too slow to handle decoding in software.

Re:What exactly is the big deal?

[WNight]

I feel like my collection might be worth something in the future. It's not unreasonable that WMAs will eventually only be playable in WMP. MS leaned on WinAmp to disable the play-to-file feature for WMA files. When do they lean on them to stop playing them completely?

Besides, I tried some blind testing (recorded some samples, had a friend randomzie the order and play them to me) and I picked the CD and the Ogg, I complained that a ton of detail was lost in most of the sample, which turned out to be all the MP3s up to 256VBR, which was as high as I went.

Even the 56k Ogg kept most of the detail. At 112k the Ogg was undistinguishable from the CD in almost everything.

This was using a fairly decent sound card (SB Live, not great, but not as crap as some) and $90 ear buds that sound better than anything else I've ever owned, speaker, headphone, or otherwise.

So I have a real reason to use Ogg and I'd like to see the format be supported in such a way that makes it usable in the future.

Not going to sue

[doublem]

Keep in mind, Archos is the same company that did the following:

Somoene writes Linux drivers. They post a link on their web site so you can download them.

Someone puts up a web site detailing how to install a larger hard drive. The site states that such activity will void the warranty. Archos offers 10 and later 20 gig devices so you can have the larger capacity without voiding the warranty.

I'd be shocked if Archos cared if people were hacking their firmware. All it does is create a developer community and expanding uses for the hardware, which they are still selling.

If you want to mod an Archos, you still need to get a hold of one, which means buying it.

This is a win-win for Archos, unless some jackasses start calling Archos demanding tech support for the Open Source Firmware. Then it becomes a nuisance.