Having bricked my router trying to use unofficial firmware, i was nervous about trying it on my iAudio x5 (the sucessor to my fondly remembered but increasingly unstable Iriver h-140,) however I decided to be brave, and I’m having a lot of fun.
There is a group who have developed a firmware called Rockbox, which runs on many popular MP3 Players including (shudder) iPods. I was looking for a way to tweak some extra settings, maybe change the theme of the playerm but rockbox does so much more. I’ve just been playing Doom (I’ve arrived – they’ve ported Doom to my mp3 player!) and sudoku (much more my style) as well as solitaire and looking at the various effects.
I like my music to be organised the way I like it, rather than using the database functions in iPods and other players. I know what I want to have where. However, the Rockbox will build an index of all of the files which I have on the drive and let me access that database, as an alternative to the folder system I have. It may not be used often but I’m glad it’s there!
So far it’s won’t play back videos like the original firmware will, but I may not have installed the right plugins and i don’t really care about video on a screen that size. If I want to watch video I’ll use my phone.