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."

Glad to have options

[Kyle Hamilton]

Im glad that there are options for people that want to use differnt types of frimware we can pick our OS's and our software its about time we get to pick firmwere and drivers

DMCA

[mirko]

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...

Re:DMCA

[mocm]

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.

Re:O is for Opinion

[y0ta]

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.

Re:Booting from an iriver iHP-140

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Wishlist...

[leonmergen]

The people at Rockbox weren't able to build in OGG support for the Archos either, since it's too cpu intensive. In the Archos, and probably in the iPod too, there is a hardware MP3 decoder.

iirc, they do give you a guide how to build your own OGG decoder, hardware-wise, but really, how many people would do that...

Re:Note from Rockbox project manager

[Chaotic Evil Cleric]

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.

Apple does this regularly to discourage tinkering by open source people, like their choice to use Broadcom Wireless Cards over any of the other vendors who are well supported by open source and have open documentation. Look at the list of things unsupported on the PPC platform and realize this is not because of lack of effort on the part of the Linux guys, but because of lack of documentation and roadblocks set up by Apple themselves.