I hope to see the same for iPods too. Do you guys know that if you buy a new hard drive for the store to install into your faulty ipod with a dead drive, there is nothing you can do to get it working again?
Some even hypothesize that Apple encoded something special into the firmware of the drives they buy as part of an anti-hacking measure.
I'd say to them "Go fsck yourselves!" to think that there are so many features that they did not implement, like a *real* EQ, and gapless playback, and even OGG format support, and yet their engineers have a lot of time to do stuff like these?
I read that Vorbis decompression was too CPU intensive for the iPod and would suck its batteries too quickly (something with floating point emulation, I can't remember well).
Funny nobody mentioned it and why they'll be sued because they're not doing it as a hobby but as a company... Unless iRever people actually agree but this'd be a first one...
As long as they don't use any iRiver code, why should there be a DMCA issue. That would be like saying I can't remove Windows from my PC/Notebook/iPaq and replace it with Linux because of the DMCA.
What's wrong with writing a new operating system for an existing piece of hardware? Unless there are specific authentications being done between hardware and software that are protected, then nothing can be done to me. I'm not reverse-engineering their efforts. I am merely creating my own way of doing it. Maybe I don't understand some particular facet of the DMCA, but by all means, prove me wrong.
But, if your OS that you are writing is scanning hardware and extracting information in the way that the manufacturer did intend, then what's the problem? I guess, I conisder the "firmware" to be an OS of sorts.
"If you're writing an OS for it, then you'll have it scanning your hardware and extracting info in a way that was not meant to be by the manufacturer/distributor (who solely intend this product to play sound files with a possible restriction -maybe not ATM but later, re-read the product EULA...- to DRM'ed stuff)."
Well, the First Sale Doctrine which appears in section 109 of the Copyright Act of 1976 states that the rights owner can not longer control the use of the copyrighted product once it's been releas
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.
I'm skeptical about the success of this. One of the reasons the rockbox software was so popular and great for the original Archos Jukeboxs' was because their original firmware was terrible.
I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
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.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
Anybody with an archos mp3 who uses playlists will vouch for that fact that rockbox's firmware pwns archos. It can take so many more songs and it loads them in a fraction of the time
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.
It does play ogg vorbis.
It doesn't play ogg flac. It doesn't play any lossless codec (except for uncompressed wav), for the matter.
And, for classical music lovers, that's an actual problem.
And, for classical music lovers, that's an actual problem.
I would guess that classical music doesn't really demand much in frequency range, but requires a very accurate stereo image. Wouldn't an independent stereo (avoid joint at all costs) 160+ kbps encoding in a decent encoder, such as LAME, be sufficient for listening to classical music on a portable?
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.
Avoiding joint stereo makes quality worse, not better; unlike older encoders, LAME only uses mid/side for frames when it is a genuine benefit. If there is no correlation at all between left and right, LAME will not bother. This only works on LAME - other encoders follow the standard's mechanism for switching between mid/side and full stereo which is buggy;)
I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
I personally love my H120 with the 1.40US firmware, but a lot of people are becoming quite pissed off about the whole thing. iRiver has repeatedly made promises on release dates, only to turn around and break those promises. Not only that, but when iRiver actually did release a new
I'm not sure what's up with iRiver and the broken promises of new firmware. iRiver apologists have been banging on about how this is all a bonus and one should live with the state of the player as shipped but... iRiver certainly made a selling feature of the upgradable firmware.
On the other hand, there isn't a hard-drive player on the market which touches the iHP-100 range (sadly including iRiver's next product the H300-series) and I've pretty much tested them all in a professional capacity as a journalist. The existing firmware is, it must be said, damn good. The way it just works with your file structure if you prefer (and I do), the way navigation works, the way settings work, switching modes, voice recording etc - it's all just right.
So iRiver really do know what they're doing when it comes to software engineering. It's actually the iRiver software that makes it stand out from the crowd. However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode. It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. That sucks. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank. (You can still be Ann)
But let's look at what's good here. With the existing software, you can configure what sorts of play modes you like including shuffle modes. Then when you press and hold the A-B button (on the unit itself or the fantastic remote control), it will cycle through just your preferred modes and not every one of them. Brilliant.
What iRiver needs more than anything else is just a rocket up them to fix the issues and deliver what they've promised. They're a fairly typical Korean company in that 99% of the noise out there from customers doesn't reach anyone making decisions but I think that will change now a slashdot story about a vaporware opensource alternative has appeared.
That's why it's good news. Of course if someone could pressure them into dumping the proprietary software and incorporating the same USB mass storage approach as the 100-series for the otherwise-brilliant iFP-700/800 flash players, that would be the icing on the cake. Then I could switch to something smaller and lighter for the British summer.
(Meanwhile most other manufacturer's of flash-based MP3 players tell you that you don't need USB 2.0. Sigh)
However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode. It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. That sucks. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank.
I don't mind the lack of a real shuffle. It seems to re-randomise whenever I add o
Some enterprising person found an entertaining workaround to the issue of broken shuffle.
He found that if you add a bunch of really short silent mp3's, the player will re'random'ize the shuffle if you delete one of them within the player with the latest firmware. just add about 10 of them, and delete them as you find the shuffle being repetitive.
Better than nothing for the time being.:)
Shuffle's not really something i use personally tho. OTF playlists would be nice, but about all i'm interested in eventually seeing is the gapless playback. currently the player has gap delete working (ie, removing silence from inside music files) but not a prebuffering system to start playing the next song immediately. it was never scheduled for the first of the two upcoming firmware releases anyway, tho.
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 [rockbox.haxx.se] if you have any questions.
With custom coded firmware being made for a device that looks like Just Another Hard Drive to your computer when plugged in, how long will it be before we end up with some odd - and possibly not-good - tweaks to the system?
Obviously, some tweaks could be useful, depending on what the firmware can do with the onboard hardware. I'd love to hear some ideas on those... How to make a media device into something more than a media device, from odd screen displays to any number of other things.
But then what about possible tweaks that could be harmful? Put an autorun file on the drive, have it search the computer it is connected to for something, copy it to the device, and then have the device hide the info in some way?
"Oh, no, sir, I was just hooking it up to the computer so I could listen to MP3's over the better speakers. More relaxing work environment makes for better productivity."
The player doesn't get a whole lot of control over how the operating system sees the attached disk. Once the usb plug goes in, the player basically enables a usb-storage-on-a-chip component and turns on the hard drive, so far as I know.
The operating system sees the entire disk, so you'd have a hard time hiding stuff, unless you convinced the drive to violate the low level formatting to get outside the accessible area or something once the player had been unplugged. i suppose you could mod the firmware to mo
Sooo... what if we throw the information through a simple (weak) encryption method, then scatter it throughout ID3v2 tags in not-normally-used frames. Depending on the size of complete chunks of information, you may be able to fit relevant things in a single tag (U:P combos), or even have some songs with index tags for combining the information chunks.
With this method, it doesn't matter if the OS sees the entire disk, because it still just contains MP3's. That happen to have some weird stuff in the ID3v2
How about a mini web server running on the portable player? One that is similar to the adjustable options page on many household broadband routers, so you could adjust settings at greater ease than you would with a small black-and-white LCD screen.
I'm not certain how that would work out. After all, the player shows up as a USB Disk device to computers. Does it have a way to gets its own IP Address and have a network stack?
About all I could think of maybe working similar is to throw the web server software on the drive and run it on the machine it is connected to.
Anyone who knows about USB tech, is this possible?
1: I connect my iHP-140 directly to another USB mass-storage device
2: With its hacked firmware, the iRiver is smart enough to read and write the other devices disk
3: Hmm, what might I do next, having linked my mp3 player to somebody else's, and having access to their files? Nope, can't think of anything...
The Neuros Audio Computer Team [neurosaudio.com] is just doing the same thing for it's far superior player. But this time, the releasing of the firmware code was done after the manufacturers approval. Way to go!
Too bad the released code will only compile under Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio, a USD. 3500 closed source IDE and compiler.
A GCC target [sourceforge.net] for the TI DSP the Neuros has in (C5416) is already on its way, though.
i'd be REALLY REALLY happy if someone found a way to make the iriver iHP-140 boot to say, dos or something.
I've tried a lot of things so far. HP's usb dongle boot formatter, booting with usb-enabled DOS floppies, short of actually installing winME to try that. Best that i can tell, not much likes formatting a bootable fat32 drive that's larger than 32G anymore:(
I even tried making a tiny 100MB partition at the end of the device, but haven't found anything that'll work long enough to format it a
yopu could do something silly and waste a $0.13 CDR and make it bootable into dos without your files on it.
but nahhh...
I do exactly that every single time.
there are plenty of DOS bootable ISO's or.bin files floating around for nero to make a bootable DOS CDROM. hell strip the bootable out of a win98 or winme install CD.
why people dink for day's trying to get a bootable DOS thumbdrive in something that is too big (spend $12.00 and buy a 16 meg thumb drive.) it blows my mind.
Because it's convenient for me to use a device I already have, and I like challenges. As for CDR's, you can't easily EDIT the dos files to test it as a startup floppy for a particular game that refuses to run under windows:)
Besides, things like Symantec Ghost would be handy in a setup where I had a large amount of usb storage handy, although i could do that easily with a bootable floppy.
it's the principle that counts however. I *should* be able to do it, hence I want to. I don't want to waste more money o
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.
What about the M3 then? Slimmer than iPod, longer battery life, more features, remote is a tad fiddly if you like the child-like interface of the iPod, but the stick of the iRiver isn't brilliant either.
. 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.
Indeed. I've had an iRiver IHP-120 since February, and I've not even opened the packet that the CD came in. Sure, that means that I'm missing out on stuff like the db creation tools - but I can't say I feel the loss. Plug the player in, drag 'n' drop files to it, unplug it. Easy. No com
However, you also have the option of creating it under Linux using iRipDB http://www.marevalo.net/iRipDB/ [marevalo.net], since I believe iRiver made the database spec open.
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.
The only thing that prevents some of the older models from gaining new codecs is processing power, time, and in a few cases, lack of free space in the flash ROM for the new codec.
I'll be interested to see what the rockboxx stuff comes up with.
By developing Open Source Firmware to remove bugs from the player we are sending a messenger to proprietary firmware developers that they can just release a buggy firmware and the open source community will solve all their problems.
I highly doubt that. We have to keep in mind that the Slashdot crowd is not your average Joe. The masses on the streets are the ones who need well working hardware more than we do and the hardware producers know this. They're not going to let quality slide because 0.2% of their
Wishlist... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some even hypothesize that Apple encoded something special into the firmware of the drives they buy as part of an anti-hacking measure.
I'd say to them "Go fsck yourselves!" to think that there are so many features that they did not implement, like a *real* EQ, and gapless playback, and even OGG format support, and yet their engineers have a lot of time to do stuff like these?
That stupid POS!
Re:Wishlist... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wishlist... (OT by the way) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wishlist... (Score:4, Informative)
I dunno about drives, but the iPod firmware is quite easy to replace. Witness iPod Linux [sourceforge.net].
Parent
DMCA (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless iRever people actually agree but this'd be a first one...
Re:DMCA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DMCA (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:DMCA (Score:2)
Re:DMCA (Score:2)
Re:DMCA (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the First Sale Doctrine which appears in section 109 of the Copyright Act of 1976 states that the rights owner can not longer control the use of the copyrighted product once it's been releas
TiVo (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool but (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cool but (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Cool but (Score:3, Informative)
Just think of it... (Score:2)
You'd then have the coolest paperweight in your office. "Be the envy of all your friends" and all that.
O is for Opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm skeptical about the success of this. One of the reasons the rockbox software was so popular and great for the original Archos Jukeboxs' was because their original firmware was terrible.
I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:2, 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.
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
Anybody with an archos mp3 who uses playlists will vouch for that fact that rockbox's firmware pwns archos. It can take so many more songs and it loads them in a fraction of the time
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:3)
I would guess that classical music doesn't really demand much in frequency range, but requires a very accurate stereo image. Wouldn't an independent stereo (avoid joint at all costs) 160+ kbps encoding in a decent encoder, such as LAME, be sufficient for listening to classical music on a portable?
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:2)
Re:O is for Opinion (Score:3, Informative)
I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player.
I personally love my H120 with the 1.40US firmware, but a lot of people are becoming quite pissed off about the whole thing. iRiver has repeatedly made promises on release dates, only to turn around and break those promises. Not only that, but when iRiver actually did release a new
This is good news but perhaps not why you think (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, there isn't a hard-drive player on the market which touches the iHP-100 range (sadly including iRiver's next product the H300-series) and I've pretty much tested them all in a professional capacity as a journalist. The existing firmware is, it must be said, damn good. The way it just works with your file structure if you prefer (and I do), the way navigation works, the way settings work, switching modes, voice recording etc - it's all just right.
So iRiver really do know what they're doing when it comes to software engineering. It's actually the iRiver software that makes it stand out from the crowd. However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode. It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. That sucks. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank. (You can still be Ann)
But let's look at what's good here. With the existing software, you can configure what sorts of play modes you like including shuffle modes. Then when you press and hold the A-B button (on the unit itself or the fantastic remote control), it will cycle through just your preferred modes and not every one of them. Brilliant.
What iRiver needs more than anything else is just a rocket up them to fix the issues and deliver what they've promised. They're a fairly typical Korean company in that 99% of the noise out there from customers doesn't reach anyone making decisions but I think that will change now a slashdot story about a vaporware opensource alternative has appeared.
That's why it's good news. Of course if someone could pressure them into dumping the proprietary software and incorporating the same USB mass storage approach as the 100-series for the otherwise-brilliant iFP-700/800 flash players, that would be the icing on the cake. Then I could switch to something smaller and lighter for the British summer.
(Meanwhile most other manufacturer's of flash-based MP3 players tell you that you don't need USB 2.0. Sigh)
Re:This is good news but perhaps not why you think (Score:2)
I don't mind the lack of a real shuffle. It seems to re-randomise whenever I add o
Re:This is good news but perhaps not why you think (Score:5, Interesting)
He found that if you add a bunch of really short silent mp3's, the player will re'random'ize the shuffle if you delete one of them within the player with the latest firmware. just add about 10 of them, and delete them as you find the shuffle being repetitive.
Better than nothing for the time being.
Shuffle's not really something i use personally tho. OTF playlists would be nice, but about all i'm interested in eventually seeing is the gapless playback. currently the player has gap delete working (ie, removing silence from inside music files) but not a prebuffering system to start playing the next song immediately. it was never scheduled for the first of the two upcoming firmware releases anyway, tho.
ashridah
Parent
USB on the go? (Score:2)
Does anyone know if you need special USB hardware to support USB host operations (not found in the H1xx series), or is it just in the driver?
wishlist: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wishlist: (Score:2)
Note from Rockbox project manager (Score:5, Informative)
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 [rockbox.haxx.se] if you have any questions.
/Björn
Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, some tweaks could be useful, depending on what the firmware can do with the onboard hardware. I'd love to hear some ideas on those... How to make a media device into something more than a media device, from odd screen displays to any number of other things.
But then what about possible tweaks that could be harmful? Put an autorun file on the drive, have it search the computer it is connected to for something, copy it to the device, and then have the device hide the info in some way?
"Oh, no, sir, I was just hooking it up to the computer so I could listen to MP3's over the better speakers. More relaxing work environment makes for better productivity."
So, what might be able to be done?
Re:Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:2)
The operating system sees the entire disk, so you'd have a hard time hiding stuff, unless you convinced the drive to violate the low level formatting to get outside the accessible area or something once the player had been unplugged.
i suppose you could mod the firmware to mo
Re:Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:2)
With this method, it doesn't matter if the OS sees the entire disk, because it still just contains MP3's. That happen to have some weird stuff in the ID3v2
Re:Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:2)
Re:Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:2)
About all I could think of maybe working similar is to throw the web server software on the drive and run it on the machine it is connected to.
Re:Next on the agenda, how will this be tweaked? (Score:2)
1: I connect my iHP-140 directly to another USB mass-storage device
2: With its hacked firmware, the iRiver is smart enough to read and write the other devices disk
3: Hmm, what might I do next, having linked my mp3 player to somebody else's, and having access to their files? Nope, can't think of anything...
iRipDB - Create the Iriver DB on linux... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.marevalo.net/iRipDB/
for a nifty database creator.
Matthew
More Free Software for Portable Players (Score:3, Informative)
Neuros Digital Computer (Score:2, Informative)
Too bad the released code will only compile under Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio, a USD. 3500 closed source IDE and compiler.
A GCC target [sourceforge.net] for the TI DSP the Neuros has in (C5416) is already on its way, though.
Booting from an iriver iHP-140 (Score:2)
i'd be REALLY REALLY happy if someone found a way to make the iriver iHP-140 boot to say, dos or something.
I've tried a lot of things so far. HP's usb dongle boot formatter, booting with usb-enabled DOS floppies, short of actually installing winME to try that. Best that i can tell, not much likes formatting a bootable fat32 drive that's larger than 32G anymore
I even tried making a tiny 100MB partition at the end of the device, but haven't found anything that'll work long enough to format it a
Re:Booting from an iriver iHP-140 (Score:3, Insightful)
but nahhh...
I do exactly that every single time.
there are plenty of DOS bootable ISO's or
why people dink for day's trying to get a bootable DOS thumbdrive in something that is too big (spend $12.00 and buy a 16 meg thumb drive.) it blows my mind.
Re:Booting from an iriver iHP-140 (Score:2)
Besides, things like Symantec Ghost would be handy in a setup where I had a large amount of usb storage handy, although i could do that easily with a bootable floppy.
it's the principle that counts however.
I *should* be able to do it, hence I want to. I don't want to waste more money o
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Cowon M3 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. I've had an iRiver IHP-120 since February, and I've not even opened the packet that the CD came in. Sure, that means that I'm missing out on stuff like the db creation tools - but I can't say I feel the loss. Plug the player in, drag 'n' drop files to it, unplug it. Easy. No com
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Informative)
However, you also have the option of creating it under Linux using iRipDB http://www.marevalo.net/iRipDB/ [marevalo.net], since I believe iRiver made the database spec open.
Re:THIS KICKS ASS!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:THIS KICKS ASS!! (Score:2)
The only thing that prevents some of the older models from gaining new codecs is processing power, time, and in a few cases, lack of free space in the flash ROM for the new codec.
I'll be interested to see what the rockboxx stuff comes up with.
ashridah
Re:Not Such A Good Idea (Score:2)
I highly doubt that. We have to keep in mind that the Slashdot crowd is not your average Joe. The masses on the streets are the ones who need well working hardware more than we do and the hardware producers know this. They're not going to let quality slide because 0.2% of their