Status of Rockbox on iriver devices
Introduction
The port of Rockbox to the iriver H120/H140 players began in late 2004 and the iriver H340 in August 2005. Both ports are currently in an advanced state of development (including multi-codec audio playback) but the first official release has not yet been made.
IriverPort contains more technical and background information, and is aimed at developers or the technically curious.
IriverRuntime contains run-time test results for various codecs.
Release Roadmap
This roadmap outlines the main features that can be expected to be available in future official releases and their current status. There are no timescales for these releases.
Blocker bugs
The following bugs must be fixed before a release of Rockbox for iriver
| Bug |
Status |
More info |
| Crash when loading cfg file |
95% |
Rockbox sometimes crashes when loading a config file during music playback. This has been worked around by stopping playback, but this should only be done when it is really needed. |
| Codecs crashing on invalid input |
0% |
The Rockbox codecs do not deal adequately with unexpected input. An example is Tremor crashing with Ogg files encoded with the Beta 4 encoder or earlier. |
| Low battery protection |
90% |
Some protection needed to ensure that Rockbox does not attempt to write to HD when there is insufficient battery power to spinup the drive. This has been discussed on IRC and the forums here, but there is at least one report of the problem on this thread on MisticRiver. Rockbox will now shut down even if writing fails, after trying for 8 seconds. |
| Missing voice file breaks playback |
0% |
If a language with no voicefile is selected and voice menus are on, music will be interrupted every few seconds by static and squeeks. A serious problem since Rockbox ships without voicefiles. There may be something more to this than what I described here - I tested it with dansk.lang. |
Tasks Remaining
The following features need to be fully implemented and debugged before Rockbox can be considered ready for a first official release:
| Task |
Status |
More info |
| Multi-codec audio playback with seeking support |
90% |
See SoundCodecs |
| Rockbox Manual including iriver |
95% |
In progress - see https://www.rockbox.org/manual.shtml |
| Remote support |
95% |
WPS, Playlist, menus and file browser supported |
| FM Radio support |
100% |
Fully implemented |
| Recording support |
95% |
See IriverRecording |
| Voice UI |
80% |
Supported with a few problems occasionally. |
Discussion
Release-critical features
I'm of the opinion that a release should do (at least) everything the iriver firmware does so that no feature is "missing", compared to iriver. An exception to this being wma support and features that are less important and/or unlikely to be implemented anytime soon (such as FF/RW with sound). This would include full remote support, FM Radio and Recording. I realize that this pushes the release date even further into the future, but I think that it'd reflect badly on Rockbox to release a version where people will say "Doesn't it even do this? I'm switching back!". Since a lot of people are already using Rockbox and knowing that it's not an official release, I'm not sure there are many ill side effects to waiting.
JonasHaeggqvist - 28 Aug 2005
IMO, we are ready for a release when a) Rockbox is extended to support all the hardware in the H1x0; and b) all pre-existing Rockbox features work on the H1x0. New features only possible on the iriver devices are optional.
DaveChapman - 13 Sep 2005
The keymapping for iriver needs a rework before a release. Also, (imho) the settings menu should also be given some thought. Any UI-wizards out there?
MartinArver - 26 Sep 2005
We now have
SoundCodecWMA support, and the unofficial Bootloader V7 pre-3 for the H1x0 series supports flashing Rockbox to ROM. An official release of Boodloader V7 could officially herald a 3.0 release. Every major feature we need is officially there, and the performance of Rockbox on the H1x0 series is stellar.
RobertMenes - 13 Oct 2007
There still exist two blocker bugs IMO before a 3.0 release on H1x0: Bootloader V7 should detect and support all three remote types and we should squash the
disk-full-writes-corrupt-file filesystem bug.
DavideGentile - 14 Oct 2007
Specific items
Regarding the metadata parsing as I saw questioned on IRC, I think what I meant was things like APEv2 in MP3 files (frankly I don't care, but I think some do) and stuff like arbitrary vorbiscomment and ID3v2 fields. Related patches:
JonasHaeggqvist - 13 Sep 2005
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