More Linux Portable Media Players On The Way

An anonymous reader writes "According to LinuxDevices.com, Taiwanese motherboard maker FIC will unveil a Linux-based portable media player (PMP) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. FIC's 'Vassili' includes a 3.6-inch color LCD screen and a 20GB hard drive, and supports files in MPEG 1-4, MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, AVI, and JPEG format. Speaking of Linux-based PMPs, Archos will also showcase its lastest PMP, the Pocket Media Assistant PMA400 at CES, and other Linux-based PMPs have recently been announced by iRiver, Veritouch, and Zupera."

Comments

But the real question is...

[mohrt]

can I hack it to run MAME?

Re:But the real question is...

[Catbeller]

Valid question.

-Firewire is freely licensed by Apple.
-USB is not. At least last I heard.

-Firewire does not require a CPU, ie a PC, to mediate file transfers.
-USB requires a PC. And originally, Windows, tho that changed eventually.

-Firewire 400 is faster than USB.
-Firewire 800 is faster than USB2. Note that contention on the inferior bus and the mediation of the CPU are two big factors that retard USB and USB2.

-Firewire, six-pin, has a superior ability to power peripherals compared to USB.

-(Bone to pick) Firewire and USB were introduced by Apple and Intel, respectively. Intel used its influence in mobo design and OEM to promote its own, inferior, standard over Apple's. (And Apple waived the licensing fees - $1 per mobo, I believe, early, so that was not a factor). As a result, to this day Firewire still hasn't hit the magic numbers to drop the cost down to parity with USB. Microsoft had no small role in retarding the introduction of Firewire in Windows. MS/Intel swing a lot of weight. They did not exactly like Apple making a new standard.

So we're stuck with a slower data transfer rate in real life and a lousy peripheral power option because Intel wanted to rool over all.

Re:But the real question is...

[Catbeller]

This is irrelevant in most cases (unless you are transferring data between peripherals). The advantage of the USB approach is that the everything is considerably simpler and cheaper.

It's a circuit board and a cable. The costs are negligible in either USB's or Firewire's manufacture; the cost was in the initial implementation in hardware and software.


How exactly does Intel (or Microsoft, for that matter) profit from USB being the standard? It was just that Firewire was considerably more expensive than USB to implement -- both on the host and on the peripheral side. To this day, the only popular Firewire peripherals I know of are DV camcorders.

Apple and Intel were engaged in simultaneous R&D on a high-speed serial bus. An old story. Who benefits? Well, for one, Intel didn't want to find it wasted time and money.

Secondly, and most importantly: Intel is in the business of making processors. They designed USB to require an Intel processor to operate. (3. Profit!) That simply wasn't necessary, and it slowed the actual data rate a great deal.

Remember, we had to wait a long time before USB2. We were putting up with pokey speeds on bloody everything. Webcams sucked mostly because they were trying to send a video signal down a telegraph wire. Firewire worked fine, but was unavailable because Intel made it clear to everyone concerned that supporting Firewire would not make Intel happy. (AMD wasn't a factor yet.)

It was a Catch-22 for Firewire. With no boards or peripherals supporting it, no incentive to build same. USB's unit cost dropped, Firewire stayed high. And as electronics companies usually do, they cranked up the price of the technically superior Firewire components because those who needed the speed would pay through the nose for it.

Maybe that's because the complex protocol makes everything expensive while offering few advantages?

Firewire was more complex than USB - but a Celeron is also more complex than a 486SX. Yet a Celeron costs less than the old 486SX. After the initial costs are recovered, it's just mass production. Ditto USB and Firewire components.

Death of the PDA

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who finds it sad that these monstrosities are replacing PDA's? I remember how excited I was at the possibilities presented by those amazing, tiny computers. The things we could do with them, now and in the future. Now that everyone has their calendar app, the innovative companies that were making them are either going out of business or dropping the product lines.

But it's OK! We have this nifty device you can watch movies on! Look at the pretty colors!

So they run Linux ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Who the FUCK cares?

Girl: "Hey, that's a cool MP3 player!"
Luser: "It's not JUST an MP3 player! It runs Linux with a 2.4 kernel, and I even have a copy of GCC installed so that I can compile stuff on it!"
Girl: "Uhh, okay ... *goes off to flirt with some other dude with an iPod*"

Re:So they run Linux ...

[MikeMacK]

2.4! Dude, come on, of course she's not impressed, should be running 2.6!

But is it OPEN?

[orthogonal]

Serious question: does that mean they are open source?

I mean, as an end user, I don't much care if something is "linux-based" or "foot fungus-based" if I can't open it up and re-do the way that works best for me.

I had an Archos, and the guys at rockbox.org went to considerable trouble to reverse engineer it (and I contributed my own smidgen of code to that project), but Archos apparently saved a bunch of money on assembling their machines, and the damned thing broke down (and mine was far from the only one to break down -- I'll no longer buy anything from Archos).

And Archos's firmware was so ridiculously bad (the Rockbox guys sped up directory browsing alone by a factor of perhaps 50) that I no longer want to buy an mp3 player that I can't hack. Having hacked with teh Rockbox software, I know what I want in an mp3 player -- and I figure I'll have to do it myself.

I want a new mp3 player, indeed my mom wanted to buy me one for Christmas and asked what kind I wanted, but I wasn't anymore versed on what is open source and what isn't but is reversed engineered and what is totally closed, so I couldn't tell Mom what to buy.

Loss for me, loss for the electronics store, loss for the manufacturer.

So "linux-based" I don't really care about -- open source, I care about.

So reply if you know: what hard-drive based mp3 players have hackable source or open source firmware replacements?

Re:But is it OPEN?

[tobiasly]

The Neuros has open firmware, hardware, and software. You currently have to download a trial version of TI's compiler for their DSP, but last I knew there was an effort underway to get a gcc target written for it.

Start here to find out more about its open-sourceness.

I hope they use mplayer... (and support NUV)

[poopie]

I seriously hope they use mplayer and add support for all of the file formats that mplayer can handle.

Why?

Well... mythtv records in this crazy format called NUV. It's opensource, but it's not in any top ten codecs list. But... mplayer supports it just fine.

I sure would like to have a portable media player that supported "raw" mythtv recordings

Why why why oh why?

[gelfling]

Yesterday I was in Target and MP3 players have reached the point where they are packaged in that impossible to open plastic card and hung on metal pegboard hooks in lots of 10. Even with extra storage we're still talking in the $150 range. Why would anyone care what OS it runs? It's practically disposable at that point.

Re:I'll save you all the trouble. . .

[JaxWeb]

Seeing as you're lazy, I'll click those little hyperlinks for you. Maybe I'll get like modded up or something for my efforts:

The FIC Vassili is limited to MPEG4, MP3, WMA, WAV, ASF, AVI, and JPEG.

The iRiver PMP-120 does not currently support it, but they promise it will soon, I think.

The VeriTouch iVue doesn't mention which formats it supports.

Zupera Technology's one is limited to MP3, WMA, WAV, CD and AC-3.

So none of them support it.

Re:I'll save you all the trouble. . .

[JaxWeb]

Actually, This says that the iRiver supports OGG out of the box.

So iRiver does.

iRiver seem to make great players in any case. When I get a new MP3 player, I'll get an iRiver. Especially if Rockbox is ported to it!