detail information
| Posted by | Rui Marinho |
| Posted on | 08/06/06 16:54 |
CD Freaks has had the pleasure to interview one of the Rockbox project founders - Daniel Stenberg (Bagder on Rockbox
community). We would like to say that we appreciate his taking time for this
interview.
CD Freaks (CDF): What is your name and where do you live?
Bagder (DS): Daniel Stenberg, I live in
CDF: What is your role on Rockbox?
DS: I've been involved in the project since the first shaky steps, before even any code existed. I'm the brother of Bjorn Stenberg who is the founder of the project and who pulled together the original team of volunteers. Me, Bjorn and Linus are the three original core developers that have been with the project since the start. I've done a lot of development and I own three Rockbox devices.
CDF: What was the motivation behind development of Rockbox?
DS: Originally, it was due to the crappy firmware of the Archos Player, which was one of the first hard-disk based mp3 players on the market. And us being, embedded developers since many years, we thought "heck, shouldn't we be able to do a better one ourselves?"
CDF: So you're an embedded developer. Is that still your professional occupation?
DS: Yes, I'm a consultant mainly doing work in various embedded systems. All three of us were. At the moment, Bjorn works with other stuff but we all have this background and interest. In fact, we all grew up with C64 and assembler hacking back in the 80s.
CDF: What were the most difficult steps in the beginning?
DS: The very first problems involved figuring out how to actually make our code run on the player. And since the Archos had scrambled their disk-based firmware file, we had to figure out how that worked to be able to replace it.
CDF: What are main problems you deal with when coding for Rockbox?
DS: Currently our main problems are to figure out how the various target players work so that we can program the best possible way to maximize run time and cpu usage.
CDF: A project like Rockbox requires an incredible amount of time and patience. Have you ever thought on abandoning it?
DS: We've been doing this since late 2001, so of course there are periods that you're not feeling too motivated but there's nothing wrong in keeping it low for a while. There are so many involved in the project it runs forward anyway and the interest is always coming back again. Of course one day some of us will abandon it but people come and go all the time. None of us are vital to the survival of the project.
CDF: Did you build your own tools for the hardware interface with the MP3 players?
DS: We use plain old make and gcc to build code for the players. We write most of the code in C with small parts in ASM. We have written a fair amount of architecture and helpful scripts but not any actual "build tools". Rockbox is also using our own very tiny kernel.
CDF: Do you have any idea of how many contributors regularly help Rockbox development?
DS: We have ~180 named contributors, ~3000 registered users in the Rockbox forum, ~1000 subscribers to the mailing lists and a few hundred registered users in the bug tracker, but regularly...hard to tell. We're some 30 people that are more or less "core" people.
CDF: Which moments were the most exciting ones, while coding Rockbox?
DS: The first "I've got sound" ones I think. When you get that feeling "it can actually work - we can do this for real". And of course, it's always very rewarding to consider that we are now actually outperforming lots of original firmwares and that we have the amount of users and developers that we do.
CDF: Have you ever been contacted by the original firmware makers? Job proposals, implementation of Rockbox ideas, etc.
DS: Nopes. Archos once contacted Bjorn and wanted to ship Rockbox on some sort of CD with their players, but since they wanted to say it was a "cooperation" between them and us we rejected that suggestion since they never helped us one tiny bit.
CDF: What do you think is missing to make rockbox mainstream?
DS: I guess it should have more eye-candy out-of-the-box, friendlier (Windows) installers. I guess getting a blessing from an actual manufacturer would also boost usage quite a lot. Not that I see that happening anytime soon… I also think that the splendid work on the manuals will make more users able to find and use Rockbox in time.
CDF: What are the prospects for Rockbox?
DS: I think the future is bright. I mean, looking at our features compared to any DAP available...there's only a few things we miss, when they're done, within a few years, we'll have a firmware that just have to become attractive and tempting for HW makers to use. The funny thing is that Rockbox evens out HW differences since it works the same on so many different players.
CDF: Do you plan running any commercial type of Rockbox in the future? Like selling its technology to big groups…
DS: Not really. We don't have any real means to do that and so far there haven't been any demands either. I mean, the only actual possibility it so sell consultancy services like for porting or adjusting Rockbox to their platforms.
CDF: How many hours per day do you spend on Rockbox?
DS: Hard to tell, since I tend to have my IRC running all day at work and do a little fiddling every now and then, but I'd say perhaps 2-3 hours in average
CDF: When can we expect video playblack on Rockbox?
DS: That's impossible to tell. None of the core devs are working on it, since we're still too focused on fixing bugs and adding things we consider more important for an audio player. I would expect that one day some interested and skilled enough person steps forward and implements a first good enough version that at least works…then we'll all join in and continue from there to make it as good as possible. That's about how Rockboy [Gameboy emulator] and doom were added. So the more people get to know about Rockbox and the better it gets, the more likely there is that a skilled person shows up and writes a video codec
CDF: Is there any support for DRM 'features'?
DS: DRM just can't be supported given the open source nature of Rockbox.
CDF: Do you have any final thoughts?
DS: It could possibly be around two things: 1) we are _very_ open in the project with all IRC logs, all mails and everything since day 1 public and available on the web site. We take copyright and legal issues seriously. This is perfectly legal because those are things "common people" always will ask about. And 2) I think a contribution factor for our good project development and speed is the pretty good architecture with daily and automatic builds we have setup that allows users to stay up-to-date easily and allow devs to know if changes break builds on any of the vast amount of supported targets, since no single dev owns all devices Rockbox runs on.
Why Choose Rockbox?
Keep the good work.
add a tag
