Okay, I'm not sure if I've put this in the right area here, but the mods/admin can move it if need be.
Anyway, there is a free and open source firmware for media player jukebox's called Rockbox. I use it on my iRiver H120, which is my main audio player (I have a 4GB nano-clone that I use when I travel, because it's a lot easier to tote around). It also operates on iPod's, Toshiba Gigabeat, iAudio X5, Archos players, and some others. It is as much an OS as it is a firmware. The way it works (for the iRiver players, at least) is that the firmware of the player is extracted, and then patched with the Rockbox bootloader. Once the patched firmware has been flashed to the player, it points the player to a collection of files residing on the storage device to run the Rockbox software. Just like a computer uses the BIOS to boot an operating system on your hard drive.
TL:DR; Rockbox replaces your stock firmware/OS
Okay, so I was thinking: since Rockbox can be ported to such a variety of hard drive and flash based jukebox's, it should be portable to these generic/"chipod" MP3/MP4 players. I'm not a programmer by any means, but it seems like it shouldn't be very complicated to write a piece of software for our generic players to extract and patch the various firmwares for Rockbox. I know there is currently a very under-developed and seemingly abandoned software to dump a firmware image from the players, but it doesn't work on any of the newer firmware versions. But I'm confident that the Rockbox developers could fairly easily write a piece of software to extract the firmware from these players and patch them to boot Rockbox - that is, if they had some players to experiment with. Since Rockbox is a community-driven open-source project, they rely on donations to develop their software. So I was thinking: I'd like to contact the Rockbox developers and inquire about opening a project to port Rockbox to our generic "chipod" players. But I doubt that they're going to open an entire project just as a personal favor to me. So I'd like to see if anyone here is interested in seeing this happen, and/or would be willing to donate hardware to the project, and get sort of a petition together to present to the Rockbox developers.
TL:DR; I'd like to see if the Rockbox developers will port Rockbox to our generic/chipod players, and I want to get a petition of people who are interested, or would be willing to donate hardware.
Post back if you'd be interested, and again, if this is the wrong place, please move it wherever it needs to be.
*edit* I forgot to post a link and tell you about all the great benefits of Rockbox! Rockbox adds a lot of great new functionality, like playlist support, customizable menus and now playing screens, and a much more intuitive and completely skinnable and customizable interface. Additionally, it can add support for new audio and video formats to some players (depending on what kind of hardware it uses). You can learn more at
www.rockbox.org
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