Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

Rockbox as a network media player

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atsakir:
Ok, this may sound a bit far fetched but I've been thinking that this may actually be feasible... bear with me and I'll explain.

1. Since the rockbox firmware is a complete re-write of a player's capabilities and for the players that USB connectivity has been reverse engineered I see no reason why rockbox can't read IP packets over USB.

2. Since most USB based WiFi dongles are based on a handful of chipsets, drivers for those chipsets have been reverse engineered (for linux) and source code for drivers exists it shouldn't be extremely difficult to port at least a driver for one chipset if not for some (as many as can fit in the firmware) drivers in rockbox to connect USB-based WiFi dongles from a large number of vendors on rockboxed players

3. IP stack source code with support for RTP, RTSP or any other realtime streaming protocol exists in linux distributions as well.

4. The database system in Rockbox can trivially be applied to a music collection on a remote host and a media server (database server) can be implemented relatively easily to serve this music over LAN (through wifi)

Unless I have missed something really important, covering these 4 requirements will mean that a rockboxed media player could be used as a wifi-enabled networked media player both for music stored on a host pc but also for internet radio streams. Of course, there would be the downside that battery-time will be significantly less  if the DAP is feeding the wifi dongle with power

Rockbox developers, am I being too optimistic or is this actually feasible?

Jennifur:
There is a problem with the second part. Most devices that rockbox supports does not have USB host capabilities. Rockbox doesn't support it on the few that have it either. So it would need to be done in software which is quite slow and may not work on most targets, or support the USB host chips on the few targets that have it.

torne:
USB host can't be implemented in software, you need a controller capable of supporting it.

Jennifur:

--- Quote from: torne on May 17, 2010, 05:21:40 PM ---USB host can't be implemented in software, you need a controller capable of supporting it.

--- End quote ---

Well, I was mistaken then. So this means only the targets with a USB host chip would be supported.

csavery:
It may also require hardware changes as it isn't a given that the correct signals / terminations have been routed on the board even when a host controller is on the chip. Example circuits I've seen from some chip datasheets indicate different connections for host and client modes. It's probably possible to do a dual mode circuit but the designers may not have chosen to do that.

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