Hello, I did this mod, too. Thanks for the ground work! I recognized that the battery is drained quite a lot. But I guess that drain mostly happens when turning the player on. First I noticed that the batterie level just after booting the player was much lower than after maybe 1-3 minutes later (idle or playing some music). That behaviour is present with a hdd as well but not as stark.

In this case the battery level was 84% just after booting, after a few minutes it was 'back' at 96%. I checked the power consumption of the ssd using an external sdd case. When powering up it's somewhere between 2 and 2,5W. After the drive is recognized by Windows (in idle mode) the power consumption goes down to 0,75W. Judging from the temperature of the ssd I guess the most of the power consumption comes from the ssd not from the external case's controller. I for one couldn't transfer all the files to the ssd (installed in the H140) unless I had a fan cooling the drive. Otherwise it would freeze the transferring process.

So I guess it's about the temperature of the ssd. I haven't yet tested long playing runs. I suspect that in playing mode the battery consumption is or might be lower than with a hdd. But for now I also think it's fact that the booting process consumes mor power than with a hdd. I had the player with the same battery running with a Toshiba MK2431GAH for the last 4 years, so that's my comparison.

Has anyone else observed a similar change of power consumption using the Samsung mSATA-SSD 1TB? Cheers, Mike Edit 1 I did some more monitoring. I transfered some more files. It took about 2,5 mins. Before the transfer the battery level was about 74-75. At the end of the transfer process it was 31! After a few minutes it was back to 70.

I also observed that while playing the level dropped from 70 to 64. Then it stayed there quite long. That's only to show my obeservation that the level stays a long time at the same number, then drops 4-5 points and stays there quite a while. I haven't done specific observtions while using the hdd, but I always thought the battery level was dropping quite evenly. Switching of at 64 and switching back on a few hours later the first number for the battery level after booting is 46 and rises back to 60 while playing.flac within 5 minutes.

Again, this happens with a hdd as well, but not to these extremes, as far as I can recall. Btw: Samsung states some 3,84W as max. Power consumption for this 1TB mSATA-SSD. So, this supports my findings. FYI: The Toshiba MK2431GAH hdd, measured using an external adapter with the pc, needs some 1,87W on startup and 0,65W in idle mode. Seems like the cool 1TB-H140 comes at a price, namely reduced battery life.

/Edit 1 Edit 2 Now that the first full cycle is done (battery completely emptied), I can report the following: Two more battery level observations: Boot to level 9, then within the first 30 sek - 7 - 5 - 3 - 2 - 1. Within the next 3-5 minutes recovery to level 28. Maybe 1,5-2h of playing (.ogg) before shutting down (by user). Boot to level 7, then within the first 30 sek - 3 - 2 - 1 - 0 - no number. Within the next 3-5 minutes recovery to level 13. While playing (.ogg) it stayed at 13 for at least one hour before going down to 8 in (most probably) one step.

Total playing time for the full load of the battery until the player shut down because battery was 'empty', with maybe 12 (20 at the most) (re-)boots, playing.ogg and.flac files when switched on, was 18h 41m. I'm not sure if this is still the original battery that came with the player about 10 years ago or if the iriver service changed it in 2007 when I sent it in to get something else repaired. In any way, the playing time is about the same as with the 240GB hdd (somewhere between 16-18h, can't remember more specifically). The player is used on an almost daily basis - I'd say 1h a day on average. So, the battery has been used quite a lot. I'd say, depending on how often one is used to reboot the player, the 1TB-SSD mod has a shorter or longer, respectively, battery life compared a conventional hdd. When playing continuously with one charge the battery life should be exeptionally long, I suspect.

Hi all, I'm new to the forums but have used RockBox on and off on various DAPs for years. This mod caught my eye, as I recently picked up a used IHP-140. The mod looks pretty straightforward, but I do have a couple questions.

Is there any advantage to using the more expensive IDE to ZIF adapter? I've already Rockboxed the IHP-140. Is the standard install from Rockbox Utility fine, or do I need to install a different version? Also wondering if recording capabilities are uncompromised with mSATA mod? Thanks, Nikolaus.

Hi Nikolaus I guess that you thinking of the Zender ZIF adapter available on eBay? The biggest advantage of this adapter, even though it is moderately expensive, is that it lets you fit a 1.8' ZIF HDD into the same space as the original IDE Toshiba drives found in the iRiver iHP 100 and H300 series.

However, the mSata to ZIF adapter that is required to mount the SSD is much smaller than the original hard drive so it should be possible to use just about any of the other ZIF to IDE adapters. Regards Michael. Thanks for the reply.

I appreciate it! It sounds like there's no really good reason to go for the more expensive Zender adapter, then.

Thanks for saving me some cash Do you know if I need to install anything other than the stock Rockbox install I have on my IHP-140? I understand I'll need to copy the Rockbox folder on the IHP to my computer and then back to the mSATA after formatting to FAT32, but do I need to do anything else?

I ask because I've seen references to needing an alternate bootloader and would need to figure out where to obtain it and how to install it before I feel comfortable purchasing the components. Thanks again, Nikolaus. I did the mod 2.5 years ago, maybe the instalation has changed since then. But that time standard instalation did not work with my 120 GB SSD.

RB booted only one of three, four trials. (But my SSD is 50pin IDE, so it was connected directly without any adapter. Adapter may change the things to better in some way.

Maybe.) A did not put RB in ROM. But the reason was, I was affaid that something might go wrong. And simply I was so happy to make H-120 work with bought SSD after several unsuccessful trials, that I did not want to take a slightest risk.

I hope to see the same for iPods too. Do you guys know that if you buy a new hard drive for the store to install into your faulty ipod with a dead drive, there is nothing you can do to get it working again? Some even hypothesize that Apple encoded something special into the firmware of the drives they buy as part of an anti-hacking measure. I'd say to them 'Go fsck yourselves!'

To think that there are so many features that they did not implement, like a.real. EQ, and gapless playback, and even OGG format support, and yet their engineers have a lot of time to do stuff like these? That stupid POS! After looking over the rockbox page, it appears that there's some sort of XOR 'encryption' done in hardware. That is, some of the chips on the device communicate with each other using this 'encryption.' If this is something that's done in software, reverse engineering and reimplementing it could be considered a violation of the DMCA.

Is it stupid? But it could cause problems if iriver wants to fight them. Even if it won't hold up in court, i doubt rockbox wants to get into any kind of lega. If you're writing an OS for it, then you'll have it scanning your hardware and extracting info in a way that was not meant to be by the manufacturer/distributor (who solely intend this product to play sound files with a possible restriction -maybe not ATM but later, re-read the product EULA.- to DRM'ed stuff). In this regard, and IMHO, I'd say they could argue about some DMCA violation even if I do not endorse this stupid west atlantic law (don't SCO attack Linux companies for something around as stupid?). 'If you're writing an OS for it, then you'll have it scanning your hardware and extracting info in a way that was not meant to be by the manufacturer/distributor (who solely intend this product to play sound files with a possible restriction -maybe not ATM but later, re-read the product EULA.- to DRM'ed stuff).'

Well, the First Sale Doctrine which appears in section 109 of the Copyright Act of 1976 states that the rights owner can not longer control the use of the copyrighted product once it's been releas. I have an ihp-120, and if I follow everything correctly, you really shouldn't be able to mess things up. You don't 'flash' your player with software. Instead, it just sits on part of the harddrive, kinda like your regular OS on your homebox. If you have to replace the 'firmware', you just would put the old on that part of the harddrive. I think the functionality of having a USB hard-drive is hardware, not software based, so reading/writing to the harddrive to fix a problem would be simple. Also, the hardware probably is responsible for checking for firmware updates.

I doubt the software checks for updates of itself. If it was hardcoded into the hardware, then after you replace the file, the hardware of the player detects it, and loads it right up. If you're worried about that, just don't use it. Sort of like Linux, I suppose.

I use Rockbox, and it is great, but Archos is a crap company who make bad hardware. If this does well, I'll get an iRiver (I'm on the rockbox mail list, but I actually missed this, heh). The Rockbox team have been looking for a good platform to port to who won't cause problems though. Although Rockbox hasn't even been threatened by the DMCA (as far as I know), other similar projects have, and have just ceased without a battle. The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis. AFAIK that's got nothing to do with the firmware (well, for Archos players anyway). The decoding of the mp3 format is done in hardware and I expect that the same is true for OGG on the iRiver.

I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player. Anybody with an archos mp3 who uses playlists will vouch for that fact that rockbox's firmware pwns archos. It can take so many more songs and it loads them in a fraction of the time. AFAIK that's got nothing to do with the firmware (well, for Archos players anyway). The decoding of the mp3 format is done in hardware and I expect that the same is true for OGG on the iRiver. IRiver H1xx series players don't have any special decoding chips, but quite a fast DSP (a Motorola SCF5249 140MHz Coldfire, says Rockbox's site).

The decoding of MP3/OGG/WMA are done in software, if I'm not totally mistaken. The Archos players have a special MP3 decoding chip, and the Rockbox firmware doesn't support for example Ogg Vorbis just because of that.

I'm curious - is that a property of the music itself, or merely that (as in my experience) classical music is more likely to be listened to by the audiophile? It's that old tech in the classical music instruments that presents a challenge. I mean we're talking about drawing a bunch of horsehairs perpendicularly across cat gut strings, and amplifying the result by resonating it on rather complex three dimensional surface composed of an organically grown, semi-irregular composite matrix of polysaccharides.

Maybe the point is that people know exactly what that horse hair, gut, and wood should sound like. Similarly for pianos, voices, brass instruments, &c. Electric instruments are amplified, tweaked, processed - they're meant to sound different from the acoustic sound. Even worse, it's different every time, so there's no mental standard to compare to. But classical music, and other acoustic music, uses sounds that we can get to know very well, so we spot imperfections in the reproduction much easier. I wouldn't say that the iRiver firmware is great, but it's not as bad as the original Jukebox.

The iRiver, after all, already plays Vorbis. I would personally like to see software that sped up the loading time on the player. I personally love my H120 with the 1.40US firmware, but a lot of people are becoming quite pissed off about the whole thing. IRiver has repeatedly made promises on release dates, only to turn around and break those promises. Not only that, but when iRiver actually did release a new. I'm not sure what's up with iRiver and the broken promises of new firmware. IRiver apologists have been banging on about how this is all a bonus and one should live with the state of the player as shipped but.

IRiver certainly made a selling feature of the upgradable firmware. On the other hand, there isn't a hard-drive player on the market which touches the iHP-100 range (sadly including iRiver's next product the H300-series) and I've pretty much tested them all in a professional capacity as a journalist. The existing firmware is, it must be said, damn good. The way it just works with your file structure if you prefer (and I do), the way navigation works, the way settings work, switching modes, voice recording etc - it's all just right. So iRiver really do know what they're doing when it comes to software engineering. It's actually the iRiver software that makes it stand out from the crowd.

However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode. It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank. (You can still be Ann) But let's look at what's good here.

With the existing software, you can configure what sorts of play modes you like including shuffle modes. Then when you press and hold the A-B button (on the unit itself or the fantastic remote control), it will cycle through just your preferred modes and not every one of them. What iRiver needs more than anything else is just a rocket up them to fix the issues and deliver what they've promised. They're a fairly typical Korean company in that 99% of the noise out there from customers doesn't reach anyone making decisions but I think that will change now a slashdot story about a vaporware opensource alternative has appeared. That's why it's good news. Of course if someone could pressure them into dumping the proprietary software and incorporating the same USB mass storage approach as the 100-series for the otherwise-brilliant iFP-700/800 flash players, that would be the icing on the cake.

Then I could switch to something smaller and lighter for the British summer. (Meanwhile most other manufacturer's of flash-based MP3 players tell you that you don't need USB 2.0. However there's a few glaring problems - the biggest, for me, is the lack of a real shuffle mode.

It's easy to end up with the 100-series playing the same sequence of tracks when in random mode. Gapless is the next most important for me with the rest of the options such as on-the-fly playlist editing and and file deletion taking up the rear of my priority list by some margin. I can live without that, to be frank. I don't mind the lack of a real shuffle. It seems to re-randomise whenever I add o.

Some enterprising person found an entertaining workaround to the issue of broken shuffle. He found that if you add a bunch of really short silent mp3's, the player will re'random'ize the shuffle if you delete one of them within the player with the latest firmware. Just add about 10 of them, and delete them as you find the shuffle being repetitive. Better than nothing for the time being.:) Shuffle's not really something i use personally tho. OTF playlists would be nice, but about all i'm interested in eventually seeing is the gapless playback. Currently the player has gap delete working (ie, removing silence from inside music files) but not a prebuffering system to start playing the next song immediately. It was never scheduled for the first of the two upcoming firmware releases anyway, tho.

I have to disagree with you about the quality of the firmware. The functions are needlessly difficult to access. Button use isn't consistant. I've had it for 6 months and I still forget when to tap the remote's nav wheel and when to press and hold it. I think you tap it to view directories, then press and hold it to back up.

Pressing and holding it first shows the settings menu. Or something like that. My wife called from the car asking how to turn shuffle mode off.

On an Archos or iPod, it would be as simp. We are not looking at the iPod or Rio Karma since they contain a chip made by Portalplayer that you have to sign away your firstborn to see the docs for. Apple does this regularly to discourage tinkering by open source people, like their choice to use Broadcom Wireless Cards over any of the other vendors who are well supported by open source and have open documentation. Look at the list of things unsupported on the PPC platform and realize this is not because of lack of effort on the part of the Linux guys. With custom coded firmware being made for a device that looks like Just Another Hard Drive to your computer when plugged in, how long will it be before we end up with some odd - and possibly not-good - tweaks to the system? Obviously, some tweaks could be useful, depending on what the firmware can do with the onboard hardware. I'd love to hear some ideas on those.

How to make a media device into something more than a media device, from odd screen displays to any number of other things. But then what about possible tweaks that could be harmful? Put an autorun file on the drive, have it search the computer it is connected to for something, copy it to the device, and then have the device hide the info in some way?

'Oh, no, sir, I was just hooking it up to the computer so I could listen to MP3's over the better speakers. More relaxing work environment makes for better productivity.' So, what might be able to be done? The player doesn't get a whole lot of control over how the operating system sees the attached disk. Once the usb plug goes in, the player basically enables a usb-storage-on-a-chip component and turns on the hard drive, so far as I know. The operating system sees the entire disk, so you'd have a hard time hiding stuff, unless you convinced the drive to violate the low level formatting to get outside the accessible area or something once the player had been unplugged. I suppose you could mod the firmware to mo.

What if we throw the information through a simple (weak) encryption method, then scatter it throughout ID3v2 tags in not-normally-used frames. Depending on the size of complete chunks of information, you may be able to fit relevant things in a single tag (U:P combos), or even have some songs with index tags for combining the information chunks. With this method, it doesn't matter if the OS sees the entire disk, because it still just contains MP3's.

That happen to have some weird stuff in the ID3v2. USB-on-the-go is what you want, and no it's not possible with the 1xx series of iriver devices. The usb dongle is pretty much directly attached to the usb-storage controller in the 1xx series. You need special hardware and software to control USB-OTG, because the device needs to operate as a host. Firewire on the other hand is another matter, since it's more of a networking system than a host-client type system.

The 3xx series does have this, mind you, although it's not compatible across the board, since se. You know, i'd be REALLY REALLY happy if someone found a way to make the iriver iHP-140 boot to say, dos or something. I've tried a lot of things so far. HP's usb dongle boot formatter, booting with usb-enabled DOS floppies, short of actually installing winME to try that. Best that i can tell, not much likes formatting a bootable fat32 drive that's larger than 32G anymore:( I even tried making a tiny 100MB partition at the end of the device, but haven't found anything that'll work long enough to format it a. Because it's convenient for me to use a device I already have, and I like challenges. As for CDR's, you can't easily EDIT the dos files to test it as a startup floppy for a particular game that refuses to run under windows:) Besides, things like Symantec Ghost would be handy in a setup where I had a large amount of usb storage handy, although i could do that easily with a bootable floppy.

It's the principle that counts however. I.should. be able to do it, hence I want to. I don't want to waste more money o. You clearly didn't read my post too carefully, i don't care about your non-helpful statements about stuff, which happens to be a repetition of stuff i've already said.

I'm trying to get this thing to boot. The only thing that will format a filesystem larger than 32GB in fat32 is win9x, and dos. I don't have win9x, and dos's format is crying about not having enough memory. Because win2k/xp won't format a large fat32 partition (which technically, is a violation of the fat32 specs, apparently), HP's util won't. Mac os x power users guide. enable tab navigation for mac pro. By developing Open Source Firmware to remove bugs from the player we are sending a messenger to proprietary firmware developers that they can just release a buggy firmware and the open source community will solve all their problems.

I highly doubt that. We have to keep in mind that the Slashdot crowd is not your average Joe. The masses on the streets are the ones who need well working hardware more than we do and the hardware producers know this. They're not going to let quality slide because 0.2% of their. Well, I can't provide you with a link to the stats or anything, but I can say that I have seen a ton of people roaming around college campuses (Michigan State and UofM) with them.

I have to say though, that nearly every review I have ever read about an new Mp3 player mentions the iPod as 'the competition'. I'm not saying that there aren't more Rio flash based players out there, or more Sony minidisk players out there, but as far as hard drive based players go, iPod is currently the king and everyone seems t. In the wake of iRiver's much-maligned (and delayed) attempts to update their proprietary firmware, this is excellent news. I bought my iHP-120 about a year ago. It came with new newest firmware availible at the time. My only gripes were:. inability to erase files.

inability to record from the radio The first item has been fixed via a new firmware release that I installed last week. I think it's a GREAT mp3 player. It has all sorts of EQ, sounds effects, does playlists, looping, records to. I have an iFP-595. Which is a nice piece of hardware (aside from the lil' joystick control toggle which doesn't respond well). Linux support is arguable at best if you want OGG support as well - their is an OSS app for transferring tracks using iRiver's native protocol which is a workable solution, but it's not as easy as dragging and dropping folders over.

There is a USB mass storage firmware option with OGG support, but 2.6 kernels have problems recognizing the UMS device. Evidentally there's a problem.

The existing firmware is OK for the H140, but navigating a large collection (5000 songs) on this puppy is a trainwreck. If you use the DB function (which reads ID3 tags), when you go to scroll through your songs by Artist, you could be scrolling for 10 minutes or longer to get from A-Z. There's no way to adjust scrolling speed. That's no way to find a song! And if you go by Song Title, 'fahgetaboutit!'

There's no search feature, and no way to earmark 'favorites' on the fly. They said they would releas. The iPod is a joke at its price range. The only competitor to the iRiver HDD players for me was the Neuros, and it was an agonizing decision, but the Neuros is just too big and needs special software to operate properly.

The iRivers present as perfectly ordinary USB mass storage devices, and the database created by the Windows driver is completely optional, allowing for cross-platform compatibility without needing to fiddle with anything. I needed Ogg Vorbis support, I needed cross-platform compatibility, I needed small and light. The iRivers aren't perfect, but they're good, solid players, and met my needs. They've also got.really. cool remotes.:).

The iRivers present as perfectly ordinary USB mass storage devices, and the database created by the Windows driver is completely optional, allowing for cross-platform compatibility without needing to fiddle with anything. I've had an iRiver IHP-120 since February, and I've not even opened the packet that the CD came in. Sure, that means that I'm missing out on stuff like the db creation tools - but I can't say I feel the loss. Plug the player in, drag 'n' drop files to it, unplug it. Agreed, I had a Neuros and it was just too big. Otherwise it was great.

I don't download music, my connection is way too slow for that. So the iRiver fits the bill nicely. I definitely like being able to use various formats with the iRiver, I have about 25% mp3's and the rest oggies. I personally don't have any complaints concerning the firmware. It works fine as far as I'm concerned. Though I'd love to try out Rockbox's stuff:) My only complaint with my iHP120 is that the damm thumbswitch is too small. The iPod is a joke at its price range.

I know what you're saying, and you're right: in terms of size + storage + features per dollar, iPod is behind. I'm also not a fan of the UI (but I've no experience of the alternatives).

Iriver Ihp-120 Driver For Mac Download

However, iPod's sheer ubiquity means that for 3rd party support nothing else can touch it. I bought an iPod instead of the alternatives because an iTrip is so much neater than generic FM transmitters. No cables, no fuss (except retuning :( ) Similarly, you can get looms to fool you.