Quote:
Originally Posted by
Parall3l 
I'm surprised that fiio don't appear to have a lot of control over the firmware.
Its rare that anyone does. Developing your own firmware is enormously expensive and requires a lot of time. Pretty much only Apple, Google, etc can afford that. People who sell tens of millions of units. Everyone else licenses it.
For example, when Apple launched the iPod, they bought a software company that made an embedded OS for media players. Even then, large parts of their binaries where licensed from other vendors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goodvibes I think you mean open code and neither Sansa or Apple don't do that either. Rockbox is not modifying their code but writing a new one instead. They likely do need a base code from the SOC manufacturer and that may be available here as well.
No, we don't use any code from the manufacturer. They generally don't provide it unless the device has a linux port, and its fairly rare for low power MP3 player chipsets to have a real linux port, although a few are starting to get them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goodvibes Think of customers bricking a player by changing a few lines of code or 2nd owners not knowing exactly what they're getting. The manufacturers code should stay what it is and if you want to boot to try and boot to something else, that's a different story.
Ideally everyone would do like Apple does and put a USB bootloader in ROM somewhere, so that if you screw up the code you can just reboot and restore with iTunes.
