Found this page linked to from slashdot.org :

http://bjorn.haxx.se/rockbox/

Basically, a group of people reverse engineered the firmware on the Archos, and released it as open source. Does anyone have any idea if the DSP used in that player is powerful enough to decode MPC?? We could finally have a hardware MPC player!

-Leto

Now to sit back and wait until this is done with the Archos 605 Wifi firmware.

Dhry

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main...#Current_status
It is only a matter of time.

Rockbox has been around for a while now so I can't see why there was a news article. What was the specific article about? Was it illegal for them to reverse engineer the Archos firmware? What?

I have always know that when I buy a DAP, there are two key points that will sell me:

1. Does it support OGG Vorbis, and
2. Is there a Rockbox firmware alternative?

How does battery life fare when playing mpc files on Rockbox? I have lost all my music (hard drive failure) and started to rip all my CD's again, fo FLAC and then mpc for portable use.

IIRC MPC is one of the most efficiently decoded codecs with rockbox (second place after FLAC IIRC), at least for the players tested.
There is a codec's performance comparison page for various DAPs deep buried in the rockbox pages which I always have trouble to find.

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

cheers

When using Rockbox, MPC is probably the most efficient codec (even over FLAC) on iPods with HDDs. FLAC takes far less CPU to decode, but hits the costly hard drive much more often.

But as for your general question - Battery life with Rockbox vs original firmware varies.
Rockbox gets better than stock battery life on most devices. Rockbox had historically gotten ~55% of stock battery life on a few troublesome PortalPlayer devices, but this has improved to ~80% recently.
Not knowing what device you have, can't say.

Thanks for the feedback, I am using a Iriver H320. I take it that's hard disk drive too as well as iPods?

Yes, but a different processor.
Rockbox will give you better than stock battery life on the H320.

Rockbox is also getting better on some players as they're now able to shutdown parts of the players that are unused. iPods running rockbox have never got the same battery life as the Apple firmware as far as I know as the processor is always running at full speed unlike the Apple firmware.

That original post is from 2002 tho!!

That is one reason why I said "Rockbox had historically gotten ~55% of stock battery life on a few troublesome PortalPlayer devices, but this has improved to ~80% recently."
The players we're talking about are specifically the 4th generation iPods (Gray and Color/Photo), Sansa E200v1 and C200v1, iPod Minis (1st and 2nd generation), iPod Video, iPod Nano 1st generation, and the iRiver H10 (both 20GB and 5/6GB variants).



That is incorrect.
Rockbox has had dynamic CPU frequency for a quite a while on the PortalPlayer chips (iPods included.)

I should add that battery time on the H320 has improved considerably in the last year or so (for all formats). MPC decoding is more efficient on iPods, mostly thanks to A. Buschmann's contributions to the RockBox code.

Most of the remaining power issues on iPods have now been fixed in Rockbox (in the past month), so there should be very little difference now in runtime between Apple and Rockbox firmwares.

Is the firmware in the normal download or does it involve me doing the whole install again from scratch? I never worked that out.

Rockbox is a two-part install for most players. A bootloader you install typically only once, and the firmware you extract from the .zip file onto your DAP. New bootloaders do get released every once and a while, but infrequently - so if you still have the Rockbox bootloader all you need to do is extract a current build to the root of your player.



There is still measurable (and some would say significant) battery life differences between Apple firmware and Rockbox on some of the newer iPods. The Video models still are at ~80% of Apple runtime.

there is a "new firmware" compiled with every development revision.

you should just periodically update your firmware to take advantage of development/features/fixes/etc.


later

Cool thanks for the info