Thank You for your continued support and contributions!
I realize Rockbox does not use Linux, my point was that we already have a bootstrapped software environment for the hardware, including source. Surely, that would help a Rockbox port?
How would using a CompactFlash drive for storage compare? Still flash, they can offload the cost of large storage on the purchaser, and more flexible for the user?
I don't think 4/8 GB of storage would appeal to the "audiophile type crowd".
I agree - having such a tiny amount of storage would make this extremely un-interesting for me.
Of course.It just seems odd to design an "open source portable audio player" around a CPU with no public documentation... As I think Bagder said elsewhere, whatever hardware you choose, someone, somewhere, sometime will port Rockbox to it. However, experience has shown that Rockbox running on such targets never performs as well as ones where the documentation is freely available.Having Linux source available will be helpful, but it's not the same as having datasheets.
Datasheets are available, by the way. Myself and several other community members have signed an NDA with Neuros to get them, with the explicit provision we will be writing open source code based on them.
Quote from: ZincAlloy on June 17, 2007, 06:44:03 AMI don't think 4/8 GB of storage would appeal to the "audiophile type crowd".Quote from: GodEater on June 17, 2007, 09:24:42 AMI agree - having such a tiny amount of storage would make this extremely un-interesting for me.But seeing the reaction here (and there is some of the same in our community), it looks like we need to take a more serious look at including a hard drive from the start.
NDAs limit the number of developers quite drasticly. Some developers won't be able to sign them and some won't want to. It is just so non open source'ish.Let me also remind you about the situation we have with this dm320 series: no open source codec and in fact hardly any open source at all is written to take advantage of a CPU/DSP architecture. Not even any of the video codecs. So, to take advantage of that combo you have to resort to the style almost every Linux-using commercial portable player do (including Neuros): use binary drivers and modules that aren't open source, so that you can include proprietary codecs that use the DSP accordingly.Rockbox does not allow such binary-driver work-arounds and my guess is that none or just very little DSP code will ever be written open source for this target. That leaves us with a CPU+DSP combo where the DSP part is mostly annoying and the CPU parts is far less powerful than say a Toshiba Gigabeat... Possibly it will also not reach the best possible run-time either.But then, I believe the ARM9 parts of a dm320 is powerful enough to drive Rockbox and all its audio codecs perfectly fine, and I think it is enough to also do a fair job at video playback so if dm320 is the final choice I expect Rockbox to run fine on it. The fact that we have other pending dm320 targets that can take advantage of such work is also interesting to me.
However, it is the DSP portion of the chip which has the serial ports required to interface with the DACs. So, even getting straight pcm audio to play will require some code running on the DSP. The good news in all this is that I'm currently mentoring a Google Summer of Code project to provide a bridge enabling open source code to run on the DSP. Things are moving along well, we have code running on the DSP, and are currently evaluating what the protocol should look like between the two CPUs. As this project matures, I will be writing a DAC driver for the DSP. So the situation is grim now, but we do have a project in motion to solve this problem.
The archopen.org guys have audio playback as well, you might want to talk to them about it.
The Samsung cores in particular are attractive. They're much faster then the TI ones, and are completely open (all parts are documented).
It doesn't make it a better arch in my eyes, it just shows that we can always overcome whatever obstacles they put in our way. It just seems a pity that someone one actively tries to make an open source player take this route - again.
And may1937: Rockbox already plays mpeg2 movies perfectly fine so you have to make an effort to not support movie-playing on a new Rockboxable device...
Having the ability to use a 2.5" drive is a start. Yes it makes it a bit bigger, but if it offers expandability that's very valuable to the kind of people who are interested in open source.
Page created in 0.056 seconds with 20 queries.