What do you do when a company like Apple or say… Linksys is restricting it’s hardware to the bare minimums. I mean DD-Wrt brought to us a 60$ linksys router with the features of a 3000$ Cisco router, that’s what the beauty of hacked third party firmware on widespread devices is all about. Well it seems it’s not just for routers anymore, RockBox has released rockbox 3.0 and their taking the concept of open source firmware replacements to a whole new level bringing brand new features and over 15 formats of codec support to several different music players.
Now the real question is what kind of diet pills they gave the iPod’s original firmware to get all these awesome firmware features to fit into the original iPod’s memory and processor. I mean we’re talking 15 formats including FLAC and Ogg, a 5-band parametric equalizer , MPEG video and a multilingual interface not to mention doom and a bunch of other games oh and did I also mention complete and open freedom from the tight strangle hold of iTunes. What’s even a more amazing feature is the fact it comes with a spoken interface, for those that are blind or you just for those people that don’t want to crash while driving. On top of all that all this works on the iPod, iRiver, Sansa, iAudio, Gigabeat and even the Archos models are fully supported. Though apparently the Archos didn’t get the full slew of major 3.0 improvements like the expanded codecs but come on it’s the same when it comes to the linksys open firmware.
Source: RockBox
