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Rockbox Plans Open Source Firmware For iRiver Gear

Posted by timothy on from the they're-not-crying-an-iriver dept.

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."

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too little, too late by NNKK · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. :)

  2. Note from Rockbox project manager by Bj�rn+Stenberg · · Score: 4, Informative
    Hi all.

    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

  3. Re:O is for Opinion by crwl · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.