From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
Rockbox
Rockbox includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for opera-
tion by blind and visually impaired users.
Rockbox runs on a wide variety of devices with very
different hardware abilities: from early Archos players
with 1-bit character cell-based displays, to modern play-
ers with high resolution color displays, digital optical au-
dio hardware and advanced recording abilities.
Rockbox is free software released under the GNU
General Public License.
History
The Rockbox project began in late 2001 and was first im-
plemented on the early Archos series of hard-disk based
MP3 players/recorders (including the flash-only model
Ondio), because of owner frustration with severe limi-
Main menu using default theme tations in the manufacturer-supplied user interface and
Company / The Rockbox Project
device operations. These devices have relatively weak
developer main central processing units (CPU), and instead offload
music playback to dedicated hardware MP3 decoding
Programmed in C, assembly language
chips (MAS).[1] Rockbox was unable to significantly alter
OS family Embedded operating systems playback abilities. Instead, it offered a greatly improved
user interface and added plug-in functions absent in the
Source model Open source
factory firmware. Rockbox can be permanently flashed
Initial release June 2, 2002 (2002-06-02) into flash memory on the Archos devices, making it a
firmware replacement.
Latest stable 3.10 / December 7, 2011 (2011-12-07)
release Versions of Rockbox have since been produced for
more sophisticated devices. These perform audio decod-
Latest unstable Daily ing in software,[2] allowing Rockbox to potentially sup-
release
port many more music formats than the original
Marketing target Firmware replacement for digital firmware, and adding the extensibility and increased
audio players functions already present in the Archos ports. Rockbox
Supported Digital audio players, various is run from the hard drive or flash memory after being
platforms started with a custom boot loader, so to upgrade Rock-
box, users need only copy the files onto the player’s drive
Default user Graphical user interface
interface and restart the device. Reflashing is only needed when
changing the boot loader, and on some platforms is not
License GNU General Public License v2 needed at all.
Official website www.rockbox.org The first of these ports, beginning in late 2004, was
for the ColdFire-powered devices manufactured by iriv-
Rockbox is a replacement for the standard firmware in er, focusing on the H1xx series of hard drive players
various forms of digital audio players (DAPs). It offers an (H110/H120/H140). About one year later, a port for the
alternative to the player’s operating system, in many cas- H3xx series became functional, offering similar func-
es without removing the original firmware, which pro- tions.[1]. In late 2005, work began on a port of Rockbox to
vides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhance- Apple’s iPod portable players based on CPUs from ARM
ments and functions. Enhancements include personal Ltd. incorporated into systems on a chip sold by portal
digital assistant (PDA) functions, applications, utilities, player. Throughout 2006, Rockbox ports were made
and games. Rockbox can also retrofit video playback available for a variety of iPod models. Beginning in 2007,
functions on players first released in mid-2000. Rockbox ports became available for a large number of additional
ARM based targets, including players from Sandisk,
1
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
Toshiba, Olympus and Phillips in addition to newer Apple become more of a regular app for common
and iRiver players based on a variety of ARM7, ARM9 desktops, too.[6]
and ARM11 series processors. During this time, extensive
work was conducted optimizing open source audio de- A project to port Rockbox to run as an application under
coders for each of the ARM series processors. In 2008, a full-fledged operating system was accepted for Google’s
porting began to processors based on the MIPS architec- 2010 Summer of Code[7] and completed.[8] Currently,
ture. In 2010, work began on supporting "hosted" archi- Rockbox runs on Android based players, but integration
tectures where rockbox runs as an application inside of into Android and conversion to work with touch based
more complex operating system. devices is ongoing.[9] Subsequently, an anonymous Chi-
To date, all Rockbox ports have been accomplished nese developer unofficially ported Rockbox to Palm’s
by reverse engineering with little or no manufacturer as- WebOS.[10]
sistance. As free software, many Rockbox developers and
supporters hope to eventually see official manufacturer
support for new ports, or at least unofficial assistance Customization
in porting Rockbox to new devices. Only a few compa-
nies have expressed interest in Rockbox, and none have
officially contributed code to the project or included it
with their hardware. The Sansa e200v1 port is the first to
be started at the request of the hardware manufacturer,
who gave the Rockbox team samples of their devices.
Rockbox is continuously developed, with new Git
builds being released after every source change, and sta-
ble releases every 4 months for targets deemed suffi-
ciently mature.[3] Additionally builds are often available
to developers of unsupported targets, which, while some-
what functional, are typically not ready for general users
due to incomplete features or poor stability.[4]
Future
Rockbox is targeted primarily at digital audio players, A custom Rockbox theme: Brushed Metal
rather than more powerful general-purpose devices
(such as smartphones and tablet computers), which have Subject to the limitations of each particular platform,
been increasing in popularity since 2010. Some authori- the appearance of Rockbox can be customised in various
ties expect the former class of devices to become obsolete ways. Fonts and foreground and background colours can
in the next few years.[5] be added and selected, while a simple markup language
Daniel Stenberg, a founder of the Rockbox project, can be used to create themes for the menu and playback
envisions the project evolving away from a standalone screens.[11] These themes can include backgrounds and
Rockbox operating system to Rockbox as a media player other images (such as icons), plus various formats for file
application that runs under mobile operating systems, names, ID3 tags, album art, file progress, and time and
such as Android, iOS, or MeeGo: system information.
Rockbox has essentially been a file-tree based player,
“ In a chat after my Rockbox talk at Fosdem ”
to which folders could be dragged and dropped and then
2010, two other core Rockbox developers
navigated by folder structure. However, more recent ver-
(Zagor and gevaerts) seemed to agree to the
sions have included a complementary database feature
general view that a Rockbox future involves it
which allows the player to compile information from the
running as an application.
files’ ID3 tags.[12] The user can then navigate the files re-
Out of the existing systems mentioned above,
gardless of file structure.
I’d prefer to start this work focused on An-
droid. It has the widest company backing com-
bined with open source, and it’s also the most Features
used open phone OS. I don’t think there’s any-
thing that will prevent us from working on all Codecs
those platforms, as the back-bone should be Rockbox on software decoding platforms (non-Archos)
able to remain the same and portable code we supports playback of eleven lossy codecs (depending on
already have and use. Heck, it could then also how one counts), five lossless, two uncompressed and
twelve miscellaneous formats.[13] This makes a conserv-
2
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
ative total of 30 supported audio formats, although a few • OTF ("on the fly") playlists
of them do not operate in realtime on all platforms. Ex- • True random shuffle (fresh randomly shuffled list
tensive work has gone into optimizing each codec, with every time)
FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, APE, TTA, MPC, Wavpack, • Custom UI themes
ATRAC3, Cook and WMA Pro among the fastest known in- • Dynamic Playlists (queue files to play next, or in
teger implementations for those formats.[14] other parts of a dynamic playlist)
• Stereo voice/MIC & FM radio recording to WAV/
Lossy formats AIFF/WavPack (lossless) and MP3[20][21] (limited
• MPEG audio layers I-III (MP3/MP2/MP1) model/device/target support)
• Ogg Vorbis • FM radio, including FM recording (limited model/
• MPEG-4 AAC(-LC/HE/HEv2 profiles) (in MP4 or RM device/target support)
containers) • Remote control (supporting devices)
• Musepack • Digital S/PDIF input/output (supporting devices)
• AC3 (raw or RM container) • Last.fm support (even on players lacking RTC)
• WMA Standard • Cue sheet support
• WMA Professional • Changeable selector bar
• Speex • Album art[22]
• Cook • Sleep timer
• ATRAC3
• The lossy portion of WavPack hybrid files Plug-ins
Rockbox developers can create plug-ins, which provide
Lossless formats
the user with other enhancements that may not be avail-
• FLAC able on various firmware modules.
• WavPack Available plug-ins include:
• Shorten • JPEG viewer (16 bit color/129 shade greyscale)[23]
• Apple Lossless • Rockboy Game Boy emulator (port of Gnuboy)[24]
• Monkey’s Audio • ZXBox ZX Spectrum emulator (port of Spectemu)[25]
• TTA • Doom (port of the PrBoom engine)
Uncompressed formats • WAV to MP3 encoder
• WAV to WavPack encoder
• Intel-style WAV
• MPEG video player[26]
• Apple AIFF
• PictureFlow, an album art viewer similar to Apple’s
Together they include over a dozen different PCM and
Cover Flow
ADPCM formats.
• Various games including sudoku, solitaire, chess,
Miscellaneous formats minesweeper, pong and many others (see
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/
In addition, there are playback of game audio types ADX,
PluginIndex for an official list of plug-ins)
SID, NSF, SAP, SPC, AY, GBS, HES, KSS, SGC, VGM, and
• Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) player,
VGZ. The MOD tracker format, and the Yamaha SMAF are
real-time on some targets. Needs external
also now supported.[15]
instrument set, available on Rockbox page.
Some profiles in Monkey’s Audio are not real time on
all targets due to very high CPU needs. Also, Rockbox will
not play files with a digital rights management (DRM) Architecture
scheme.
Rockbox uses a simple kernel,[27] with a flat memory
model, letting it run on platforms without a memory
Rockbox features management unit, and single process. Thin threads run
Beside the ability of playing and recording audio files, cooperatively, returning control to a scheduler that pri-
Rockbox offers many playback enhancements that other oritizes the audio thread; the only form of preemption
firmware packages may not have implemented yet. List- is through interrupts. The operating system and plug-ins
ed below are a handful of these features. are written in C, with assembly used for code that is de-
• Gapless playback[16] vice- and platform-specific, and performance sensitive.
• Crossfading[17] The simple and lightweight architecture allows Rockbox
• ReplayGain[18] to run on a variety of targets, with memory ranging from
• 5 band fully parametric equalizer[18] 1 to 64 MB, and CPU speeds ranging 12 to 532 MHz. Rock-
• Variable speed decoding with pitch correction[19] box also provides support for multicore and asymmetric
• Crossfeed[18]
3
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
multiprocessor systems based on ARM, ColdFire, MIPS
and SH. Several codecs can be parallelized across 2 CPU
Supported devices
cores for increased power efficiency, and the HWCODEC
interface allows for dedicated audio decoder DSPs.
Rockbox utility
iPod Mini with Rockbox software
The following should be considered to be a list of devices
that at least substantially work (listed as "Supported"
or "Usable" on the Rockbox wiki Device Chart). See the
Rockbox Utility running on Windows 7. Rockbox Target Status for details.
Apple
• iPod 1st generation
• iPod 2nd generation
• iPod 3rd generation, FireWire only
• iPod 4th generation, grayscale
• iPod 4th generation, color/photo
• iPod 5th and 5.5 generation, video
• iPod Mini 1st generation
• iPod Mini 2nd generation
• iPod Nano 1st generation
• iPod Nano 2nd generation
Archos
An iPod Nano showing a grayscale "Do Not Disconnect" screen • Archos Jukebox series:
from the iPod Mini series with a new screen on the iPod Classic, • Jukebox 6000
although it is bundled with the Rockbox package. • Jukebox Player/Studio
• Jukebox Recorder
The Rockbox Utility is a free computer application, avail- • FM Recorder
able for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, built • Recorder v2
using Nokia Qt platform, that is used to install and man- • Ondio FM
age Rockbox on DAPs. Rockbox Utility allows download- • Ondio SP
ing and installing Rockbox, and many of plug-ins and ex-
tras, directly onto a DAP automatically, unlike the tradi- Cowon
tional method of installing which requires downloading • X5 and X5L
the correct files and installing them onto the DAP man- • X5V
ually. The automated method of installing that Rockbox • M5, M5L
Utility uses is less flexible than manual methods of in- • M3, M3L
stalling; it does not allow installing custom themes and • D2
plug-ins. The most recent version of Rockbox Utility is
version 1.2.11, released November 6, 2011.[28] iRiver
• H10 series: H10 5, 6, 20 GB
4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
• H100 series: H100/H110/H115/H120/H140, aka [2] "rockbox software decode".
iHP-100/110/115/120/140 http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/
• H300 series: H320/H340 SoftwareCodecPlayback.
[3] "buildsys". http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/
MPIO BuildServerRemake.
• Mpio HD200 [4] "unstable". http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/
TargetStatus#Current_status_of_supported_targ.
Packard Bell [5] Joe Brockmeier (June 16, 2010). "Rockbox 3.6 and
Beyond". LWN.net. http://lwn.net/Articles/
• Vibe 500
391982/.
[6] Daniel Stenberg (February 15, 2010). "The Rockbox
Philips future is an app". Daniel Stenberg’s blog.
• GoGear HDD16x0 http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2010/02/15/the-
• GoGear HDD63x0 rockbox-future-is-an-app/.
• GoGear SA9x00 [7] "RockboxAsAnApplication2010 < Main < Wiki".
Rockbox.org. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/
Samsung RockboxAsAnApplication2010. Retrieved March 12,
• YH-820 2011.
• YH-920 [8] Rockbox Contributors. "mail archive". Rockbox.
• YH-925 http://www.rockbox.org/mail/archive/rockbox-
dev-archive-2010-08/0097.shtml. Retrieved March
SanDisk 12, 2011.
• Sansa e200 series – v1 and v2/AMS [9] "TouchscreenInterface < Main < Wiki".
• Sansa e200r series Rockbox.org. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/
• Sansa c200 Series – v1 is stable, v2/AMS is unstable TouchscreenInterface. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
• Sansa Fuze – v1 and v2 [10] "万能播放器ROCKBOX for palm pre，新软支持
• Sansa Clip/Clip+/Clip Zip 下，绝对不会失望~~ – Palm Pre/+, Pixi/+, webOS
High capacity micro SDHC memory cards can be read by – Pre,Pixi,webOS,Treo – Powered by Discuz!".
Rockbox in the c200, e200 series, Sansa Fuze (v1 & v2), Treo8.com. http://www.treo8.com/bbs/
Clip+, and Clip Zip. thread-169671-1-1.html. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
[11] "Customising the User Interface". Rockbox Manual.
Toshiba http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-
• Gigabeat F series: F10/F11/F20/F21/F30/F31/F40/
buildap2.html#x17-339000B.1.4. Retrieved May 22,
F41/F60
2011.
• Gigabeat X series
[12] "Database". Rockbox Manual.
• Gigabeat S series, standard build works, needs a few
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/
external steps
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-
buildch4.html#x7-430004.2. Retrieved May 22,
Olympus 2011.
• m:robe 100 [13] "Rockbox Supported audio formats". Rockbox
• m:robe 500 Manual. http://download.rockbox.org/daily/
manual/rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-
Rockchip buildap2.html#x17-335000B.1.
• Rockchip RK27XX (generic) [14] "Codec performance comparison – Hydrogenaudio
Forums". Hydrogenaudio.org.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/
See also index.php?showtopic=82125&view=findpost&p=716976.
• iPodLinux Retrieved March 12, 2011.
[15] "Other Codecs". Rockbox Manual.
References http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-
[1] ^ "rockbox history". http://svn.rockbox.org/ buildap2.html#x17-338000B.1.3. Retrieved May 22,
viewvc.cgi/trunk/docs/ 2011.
HISTORY?revision=16239&view=markup. [16] "Codec Featureset". Rockbox Manual.
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/
5
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rockbox
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox- [23] 129 shade greyscale is achieved on 1 bit and 2 bit (4
buildap2.html#x17-339000B.1.4. Retrieved May 22, shade) greyscale targets due to exploitation of the
2011. slow passive LCD refresh rate.
[17] "Crossfade". Rockbox Manual. [24] Rockboy supports original Game Boy and Game Boy
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/ Color ROMs.
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox- [25] ZXBox emulates ZX Spectrum 48. The original site
buildch7.html#x10-1220007.7. Retrieved May 22, of Spectemu
2011. [26] The mpegplayer plug-in supports MPEG-1 and
[18] ^ Software decoding targets only MPEG-2 video streams with MPEG audio (layer II/
[19] "Pitch". Rockbox Manual. III) multiplexed into .mpg files with no hard limits
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/ on frame rate or bit rate. Files must be encoded at
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox- native screen resolution. Seeking is now
buildch4.html#x7-630004.3.3. Retrieved May 22, implemented. [1]
2011. [27] "About the Rockbox kernel". Rockbox.org.
[20] MP3. WavPack and AIFF are not available on http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/
Archos devices. Multiple sample rate frequencies RockboxKernel. Retrieved March 12, 2011.
and bitrates are available (hardware-dependent). [28] "RockboxUtility < Main < Wiki". Rockbox.org.
[21] "Recording". Rockbox Manual. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/RockboxUtility.
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/ Retrieved March 12, 2011.
rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-
buildch10.html#x13-14900010. Retrieved May 22,
2011.
External links
[22] "Some limitations. Details at Rockbox Wiki". • Official website
Rockbox.org. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/ • FLOSS Weekly – 43: Rockbox TWiT.tv (network)
view/Main/AlbumArt. Retrieved March 12, 2011. podcast with Paul Louden of Rockbox
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rockbox&oldid=473655311"
Categories:
• Aftermarket firmware
• IPod software
• Digital audio players
• Portable media players
• Embedded operating systems
• Lua-scriptable software
• Free media players
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