OFFICIAL: IHP100 Series Rockbox Progress (NOT A DISCUSSION THREAD!!!)

[Lewis]

I know I don't have a H100 series anymore, but I still check rockbox regulary and will still update this thread when necessary.

26/10/04 Rockbox now have the LCD driver working.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/vie...an_LCD_driver_

15/1/05 Bootloader now complete

14/2/05 Rockbox now has sound (limited to sine waves)

14/2/05 Gameboy emulator running on iRiver

http://glow.m0f0.net/rockbox/pictures/gb1.JPG

23/2/05 Rockbox can now play WAV files (as a test, not properly)

13/03/05 MP3, Ogg and Flac now Decode! (this does not mean play, only decoding the file and writing it as a Wav)

15/04/2005 Remote LCD Driver is now working.

20/04/2005 Sound playback! (mp3) (Was a hack, not possible due to lack of Multi-Codec Architecture.)

06/06/2005 True MP3 and ogg playback. Not long now

CORRECT VIA PM ME IF I AM WRONG

[Haku]

I don't think they reverse engineer the existing firmware but rather figure out what hardware the unit is made of and how to program it, thus avoiding any illegalities associated with reverse engineering copyrighted software.

[linus]

We try to stay away from disassembling the original firmware for two reasons:

1) It's tedious and boring

2) We have no need for it

Sometimes we have to take a peek to find out how how it uses the hardware if we can't figure it out ourselves, but we can generally do without it.

Besides, who wants to know how they do it? We do it our way.

[linus]

Originally Posted by DeadMan

On the fly playlists.

Rockbox has that already, so it will be in the iRiver version as well.

Originally Posted by DeadMan

True shuffle mode/in playlists

Well, that depends on what a "true" shuffle means to you. Rockbox does not produce the same shuffle everytime. However, it is not a "true random" function, since it shuffles, which guarantees that no song will be heard twice until all songs have been played.

Originally Posted by DeadMan

True gapless playback

Rockbox already has seamless MP3 playback, provided that the MP3 files are encoded with care (e.g the --nogap LAME option). However, on the iRiver, we plan to go deeper than that and use the LAME header to find out how many samples to remove from the stream to play seamlessly. If no LAME header is found, we will strip all leading/trailing null samples from the stream (up to a limit of course, since the silence might be intentional).

Originally Posted by DeadMan

True gapless playback

See above

I also have a dream about crossfading and even beatmixing, but let's leave that as a dream for now.

[linus]

Originally Posted by andrewmel

you can still have random with repeated songs, its just random with replacement. imagine a hat with 100 numbered disks. shake the hat, and take them out one at a time, that is random, and still is if you put each one back after you have taken it out and give the hat a good shake.


random has more to do with the distribution of results. if you have 100 disks, and take out say 100 million each should be taken out nearly a million time. significant deviation from that isnt random.

a

I know what random means. I'm just saying that Rockbox doesn't do it that way. Rockbox does a "shuffle", which is not the same thing, as I explained in the text you quoted.

[linus]

Originally Posted by Tridion

That would be a really great feature. But probably not in my lifetime. Going off topic slightly, are there any PC software players that can do this ?

Try MixMeister, http://www.mixmeister.com/.

[JiBbEr]

Originally Posted by linus

Well, that depends on what a "true" shuffle means to you. Rockbox does not produce the same shuffle everytime. However, it is not a "true random" function, since it shuffles, which guarantees that no song will be heard twice until all songs have been played.

And when we we see this change in some firmware?

[linus]

Originally Posted by JiBbEr

And when we we see this change in some firmware?

This isn't a change. It is in Rockbox today, and it has been like that for years.

[linus]

Originally Posted by FSwartz

It would be very fine if the Artist and Album as well as the Track name all scrolled as it was playing. If someone knows how to contact the RockBox guys and suggest this it would be much appreciated.

Go to http://www.rockbox.org/ to find out how to contact us.

Regarding the on-screen information while playing, you can design your own While Playing Screen (WPS):

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CustomWPS

[afarber]

Originally Posted by linus

Regarding the on-screen information while playing, you can design your own While Playing Screen (WPS):

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CustomWPS

Very cool! Wasn't expecting that.

[linus]

The id3 database format will not be the same in Rockbox, so the database will not be compatible.

[JiBbEr]

Originally Posted by linus

The id3 database format will not be the same in Rockbox, so the database will not be compatible.

Are there plans for any Tag editing software that will be compatible with Rockboxes database format?

Does changing the firmware to RockBox, void the Iriver warranty?

[linus]

No, but we will happily help anyone who wants to write a converter.

The Rockbox database is created by a Perl script that grabs every file on the disk and stuffs the ID3 info the database. The tag editing can be done with any program you like, it's just the database creation that is special.

[JiBbEr]

Originally Posted by linus

No, but we will happily help anyone who wants to write a converter.

The Rockbox database is created by a Perl script that grabs every file on the disk and stuffs the ID3 info the database. The tag editing can be done with any program you like, it's just the database creation that is special.

Oh I see.... So all the tracks that i have categorised under Artist, Album and my own unique Genres will be invalid if viewed after updating the firmware version to RockBox? ....... So I would have to re-edit all the tags after changing to RockBox? ....... That's a shame

[linus]

On the Archos models, the only thing the firmware can do is to remove all non-mp3 data from the track so the MP3 decoding chip doesn't lose the synchronization.

That means that the MP3 files have to be encoded accordingly, i.e with the --nogap LAME option, or recorded as one file and then cut with an MP3 editor.

On the iRiver, we have access to the decoded audio, so we can remove silent parts on a sample level, which will give us a better chance to get a good result.

[linus]

Originally Posted by Lennon Legend

If there's one thing I hate more than anything else on here and on the rockbox forums, it's the sheer amount of people kissing rockbox arse.

Hehe, I can understand your reaction. So far we haven't delivered anything, so I guess we're not allmighty gods just yet.

To DeadMan: thanks, but I don't mind people asking questions. After all, it's perfectly understandable that people wonder when Rockbox is coming, since there is so much talk about it. It sometimes even sounds like Rockbox is already there.

The best we can do to avoid answering the same questions over and over is to point people to the Rockbox site for FAQ's and docs.

[linus]

Originally Posted by Luthion

I got a question, or a thought... or both things really
Will it be possible to skin the Rockbox firmware with the style of the iRiver firmware? Or, it's open source so I guess it's possible... but is anyone planing to do so? Because In my eyes it looks like the iRiver style looks better than the Rockbox... But of course, it doesn't have all the features...

No, there is no "skinning" in Rockbox. In fact, there's very little graphics at all in the user interface, for several reasons. Mostly because nobody cared, but also because the memory constraints of the Archos players prevents us from wasting valuable memory on pretty graphics.

And personally, I prefer function over looks. That's why I didn't buy an iPod.

That doesn't mean that we can't do a nice graphical interface on the iRiver. It's just that it has to be done by someone who cares, and also has the skills to code it.

[linus]

Originally Posted by Luthion

I see, and I agree with you that look shouldn't be first priority, but I won't say no thanks if I can get both...
Anyways, how much space do you got for the coding on the iRiver? Compared to the Archos?

On the Archos we have about 200Kbytes, on the iRiver 1xx we have 2Mbytes.

[linus]

Exactly. If you reprogram the flash with the original firmware, Rockbox will be removed.

[DeadMan]

I asked earlier but did not get an answer. Does Rockbox support CUE files at all either on it's own or via a plugin? WOuld be *VERY* handy for single, large MP3 files like DJ mixes (It was one way for people to get around the gapless problem whilst still being able to skip between tracks).

[linus]

No, Rockbox doesn't support .CUE files at present. Nothing stops us from doing it, though...

[linus]

Originally Posted by thefixer

Note that there's online documentation at http://www.rockbox.org/manual/manual.txt

We are currently updating the manual for the recently released 2.3 version. It's here:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DraftManual

(See chapter 2.4 for the keyboard)