The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'firmware'

2006/6/4

It looks like the Rockbox open-source MP3 player firmware is starting to get noticed. After a few years of hobbyist hackers independently shoehorning it into running on various players, often in spite of the manufacturers, one player manufacturer, SanDisk, is reported to be negotiating officially porting it to their hardware and supporting it. Which could be very good news, especially if they contribute their port back to the project, ensuring that it can keep up to date with developments.

Unfortunately, being the product of a flash memory manufacturer, the SanDisk players are all flash-based, and peak at 6Gb (though do have SD-card slots, so you can add an extra gigabyte or so if needed). Now if someone made a 40-60Gb hard-disk-based player that ran Rockbox by design, I'd be interested.

(via /.) firmware open-source rockbox software 0

2003/12/5

Ah yes, Rockbox 2.1 is out now, with a raft of new enhancements, including loadable plugins, a calendar application, a swag of new games, and a Chip 8 emulator. (I believe Chip 8 was some very primitive hobbyist home computer of the 1980s, and allowed the sufficiently masochistic to program games in machine code or something like it. It's not quite a Commodore 64 emulator on your MP3 player, but it's something.)

firmware mp3 rockbox 0

2003/12/3

Rockbox, the open-source Archos Jukebox Recorder firmware that wipes the floor with Archos' official firmware, is now able to be flashed into ROM. This makes it quicker to start (no loading from hard disk); but it also completely eliminates the need for Archos' firmware, the last proprietary component of the Jukebox.

I was thinking a few days ago that the Jukebox Recorder hardware appears to be made entirely from commodity parts; it basically consists of a laptop hard disk, a USB-IDE interface chip, a MP3 decoder chip, a display, some buttons, and an off-the-shelf Hitachi RISC CPU to control everything, with no custom chips anywhere. Even the batteries are commodity AA-size NiMH cells (unlike Apple's 18-month, non-removable iPod battery). Now that there is complete open-source firmware that runs on the hardware, how long until third-party manufacturers start cobbling together Archos-like MP3 players running Rockbox, or possibly improved hardware running hacked versions of Rockbox? Imagine dozens of small south-east-Asian tech firms making their own 20-60Gb MP3 players and selling them at the cutthroat discounts that Flash-based MP3 players have come down to (the most basic 128Mb ones can be had for just over A$100, with ones with displays and recording starting at A$125), and Rockbox becoming the Linux of HD-based music player firmware (Linux was once bound to one hardware platform; the IBM 386 PC architecture).

So we'll have MP3 players which anybody can build from off-the-shelf parts given the right equipment (you could possibly do so at home, if you really wanted to), which is not controlled by any one company, and whose firmware is entirely hackable. Which sounds very good to me.

(Of course, the Archos Jukebox hardware is rather inflexible; for instance, it has only one MP3 decoder chip wired directly to the headphone socket, which immediately rules out things such as crossfading or playing non-MP3 audio. But that's not to say that third-party variations on the theme wouldn't remedy this.)

firmware mp3 rockbox 0

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