Rockbox Plans Open Source Firmware For iRiver Gear

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."

Re:Too little, too late

[NNKK]

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. :)

Cowon M3

[gilesjuk]

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.

Re:DMCA

[meringuoid]

DMCA? How does that apply? There's no copy protection on the iHP players.

Re:Cool but

[kidgenius]

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.

Re:Wishlist...

[nkh]

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).

Re:Cool but

[crwl]

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.

Note from Rockbox project manager

[Björn Stenberg]

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 [rockbox.haxx.se] if you have any questions.

/Björn

Re:O is for Opinion

[djtrialprice]

The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis.

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 needed by the official firmware. Add to that the fact that rockbox add stability, functionality and loads of cool extras (you can play games and code your own plugins!).

If the iRiver firmware is anything like their previous efforts, you'd be mad not to try it out.

iRipDB - Create the Iriver DB on linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to let you know if you want the tag db (inc. ogg files) then head over to

http://www.marevalo.net/iRipDB/

for a nifty database creator.

Matthew

More Free Software for Portable Players

[wehe]

There is already a plethora of free software for mobile audio and video players [tuxmobil.org] available.

Neuros Digital Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:THIS KICKS ASS!!

[Billy69]

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.

Re:O is for Opinion

[crwl]

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.

Re:Wishlist...

[damiam]

Some even hypothesize that Apple encoded something special into the firmware of the drives they buy as part of an anti-hacking measure.

I dunno about drives, but the iPod firmware is quite easy to replace. Witness iPod Linux [sourceforge.net].

Re:O is for Opinion

[damiam]

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.

Re:Too little, too late

[Syzar]

It is possible to create a database from Linux, too, with iRipDB [marevalo.net]

Re:O is for Opinion

[NegativeK]

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 firmware, they didn't release the features they said they would. Everyone was quite hyped up when they saw 1.60 on the Korean iRiver website, only to find out that iRiver misinterpreted "gapless playback" (which, it turns out, would require a complete rewrite of their decoding software for the player,) and ignored other big items on the wishlist, such as OTF playlists, a kludgeless random shuffle, and a fix to a hard drive bug that can drain a sixteen hour battery in two hours.

iRiver has did a great job with the creation of the H1?0 series, but they're starting to alienate users with their empty promises.

Re:Wishlist...

[makomk]

I read that Vorbis decompression was too CPU intensive for the iPod .. (something with floating point emulation, I can't remember well).

I don't think floating-point is neccesary for Vorbis encoding. There is an integer-only decoder [xiph.org]:
The "Tremor" decoder library, an integer-only, fully Ogg Vorbis compliant software decoder library is now available under a totally free BSD-like free software license. You can check out module 'Tremor' from Xiph.Org Subversion.

Re:Too little, too late

[MrNemesis]

Indeed, the database for the iRiver is optional.

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.

Navigation of large collections

[joseph schmo]

The existing firmware is _OK_ for the H140, but navigating a large collection (5000 songs) on this puppy is a trainwreck.

If you use the DB function (which reads ID3 tags), when you go to scroll through your songs by Artist, you could be scrolling for 10 minutes or longer to get from A-Z. There's no way to adjust scrolling speed. That's no way to find a song! And if you go by Song Title, "fahgetaboutit!" There's no search feature, and no way to earmark 'favorites' on the fly.

They said they would release a firmware update in May and one in June, each to address different issues. To my knowledge, they have JUST release a beta firmware (in September), that does not even address all of the issues.

The criticism is that they are spencing all their time/resources on their new products.

I for one welcome a replacement, as long as I don't lose functionality :)