The Null Device

iRiver firmware hacking

In MP3 player news, hackers are making progress reverse-engineering the iRiver firmware and loading mechanism, with a view to loading custom firmware into the unit. iRiver have used various mechanisms (checksums, encryption, disabling hardware debugging access) to make things difficult for them, but to no avail. Of course, iRiver could very easily sue them into oblivion under the DMCA, though would probably lose lots of sales doing that (including your humble narrator, who'd probably get another Archos instead); let's hope that iRiver decide not to be asshats about this.

Meanwhile, on the Rockbox mailing lists, this is being viewed with some excitement; there is already talk of expanding the Rockbox project from just the Archos Jukebox/Recorder platform to the iRiver. Which would be incredibly cool; it could be the first step towards Rockbox becoming the Linux of portable media player OSes. If that happens, I wonder how long until companies stop making (and maintaining) their own firmware and start building players around Rockbox.

There are 2 comments on "iRiver firmware hacking":

Posted by: muxx
http://
Fri Jul 30 17:25:11 2004

guys, what about iMPs ? it would be great to extend this effort to them as well. is there any project targeted at that ? I can do some hacking on iMP.

/muxx

Posted by: acb
http://dev.null.org/
Fri Jul 30 19:29:39 2004

I suggest you go to the iRiver/Rockbox developer forums; there'd be more people there interested in talking to you.

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