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: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).

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.

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: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.