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Rockbox Plans Open Source Firmware For iRiver Gear
PlayerBlog.com writes "The crew at Rockbox, the venerable open source replacement firmware project for Archos audio players, has put together an effort to port their firmware to the popular iRiver H1xx-series
of devices. In the wake of iRiver's much-maligned (and delayed)
attempts to update their proprietary firmware, this
is excellent news."
The iPod is a joke at its price range.
:)
The only competitor to the iRiver HDD players for me was the Neuros, and it was an agonizing decision, but the Neuros is just too big and needs special software to operate properly. The iRivers present as perfectly ordinary USB mass storage devices, and the database created by the Windows driver is completely optional, allowing for cross-platform compatibility without needing to fiddle with anything.
I needed Ogg Vorbis support, I needed cross-platform compatibility, I needed small and light. The iRivers aren't perfect, but they're good, solid players, and met my needs.
They've also got *really* cool remotes.
I have an ihp-120, and if I follow everything correctly, you really shouldn't be able to mess things up. You don't "flash" your player with software. Instead, it just sits on part of the harddrive, kinda like your regular OS on your homebox. If you have to replace the "firmware", you just would put the old on that part of the harddrive. I think the functionality of having a USB hard-drive is hardware, not software based, so reading/writing to the harddrive to fix a problem would be simple. Also, the hardware probably is responsible for checking for firmware updates. I doubt the software checks for updates of itself. If it was hardcoded into the hardware, then after you replace the file, the hardware of the player detects it, and loads it right up.
The software for H1xx series is definitely on the flash, NOT in the hard drive. You can totally wipe the HD with, say, dd and the player still boots. The firmware file is only read from the HD (and decoded to flash) when you actually do a firmware upgrade from the players' menu.
While we appreciate positive attention for our work, this story is a bit early. We have just begun to look at the iRiver iHP/H1 hardware and are quite a bit away from having anything of significance to show (such as running code).
I'll try to preemptively answer some common questions:
- No, we are not violating the DMCA or any other intellectual property laws. We are only distributing software written by ourselves and we run it on our own hardware. Our software does not circumvent any access control or copy control mechanisms.
- We are not doing this to "expand our market share" or any other weird corporate-style reason. We are doing it because our old Archos hardware is becoming obsolete and hard to find so we need to find new hardware to run our software on. The fact that the iRiver has a large user base is a bonus though, since it means more potential contributors.
- We are not looking at the iPod or Rio Karma since they contain a chip made by Portalplayer that you have to sign away your firstborn to see the docs for. That is a silly practice we do not wish to encourage. The iRiver contains hardware with published docs.
Feel free to drop in on irc if you have any questions.
/Björn
This was also mentioned by someone above, and it is completely wrong. The iRiver hardware uses a processor and firmware as opposed to a hardware decoder, unlike a lot of older MP3 players. Thats how they have retrospectively added Ogg Vorbis support to the iMP range of players. So in this case, yes you are wrong, and yes, firmware does decode the file formats.
#include "disclaimer.h"
AFAIK that's got nothing to do with the firmware (well, for Archos players anyway). The decoding of the mp3 format is done in hardware and I expect that the same is true for OGG on the iRiver.
iRiver H1xx series players don't have any special decoding chips, but quite a fast DSP (a Motorola SCF5249 140MHz Coldfire, says Rockbox's site). The decoding of MP3/OGG/WMA are done in software, if I'm not totally mistaken. The Archos players have a special MP3 decoding chip, and the Rockbox firmware doesn't support for example Ogg Vorbis just because of that.
I dunno about drives, but the iPod firmware is quite easy to replace. Witness iPod Linux.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You got it exactly backwards. Classical music needs a wide frequency range, but stereo is rarely an issue (many older classical recordings are even mono). I personally think 160+kbps MP3 is fine, but I can see how some people wouldn't.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
It is possible to create a database from Linux, too, with iRipDB