This just in: There is an Adobe Flash 10.1 binary by TI to showcase flash on Cortex A8.
Who’s going to be the first to send us a video of Flash working in Firefox or Fennec under Ångström? Or someone could even try if replacing the plugin of the original opera browser would work.
Note: This is most likely not going to work on gen6. Supposedly needs Alsa while gen6 was OSS, also those units are quite RAM-limited.
Yes, this update has a cool easteregg, and in my humble opinion it lets everything else in this update pale a bit!
Archos actually added a new demuxer (container format) to their latest gen6 firmware.
And sort of a tiny bit of WebM support too on gen7. 
– more on that at the end!
There are no new codecs though, the supported codecs are still the same like before.
But still this enables you to play some more files than before. Namely those that are e.g. encoded with h.264 and then muxed with mkv. (note: resolution restrictions for h.264 still apply, e.g. 720p won’t play. This is a hardware limitation!)
Does that mean that you can now happily download every MKV file and it will play? Nope sorry, especially those so called ‘scene’ files might pose problems if they are high resolution or use high encoder profiles. Can’t verify that don’t have any such files. You’ll have to try yourself, still it will now play more files than before, so in my book it’s a great improvement!
For some free (as in speech AND beer) content you can browse The Webarchive with the keyword ‘matroska’. e.g. http://www.archive.org/details/Rhythmus21
Thanks Archos for keeping your promise!
Now back to WebM on gen7. I’m actually surprised but they added also WebM support to the Matroska demuxer (it is basically a subset of the latter). But it seems like they do not have an VP8 video codec yet, as you can only listen to the vorbis encoded audio track on an gen7 device on gen6 it gives an error.
The missing VP8 support doesn’t come as a total surprise to me though. I have yet to see an good DSP or neon accelerated implementation of VP8. Supposedly TI has something in the works, but nothing has surfaced yet. Will be interesting to see if they add it to gen7 or maybe even gen6 once something surfaces.
Gen6 does report the parameters of an WebM file in the info screen but won’t play it.
PS: This update also works nice with our boot-menu. Should also work fine on converted A5SFR A5G units.
This is a follow-up to my previous posting: Debugging Archos devices just got a lot easier.
It was a bit of work as g_serial has changed a lot inbetween 2.6.22 and 2.6.27. This version only supports one serial device. I’ve decided to bind an cat /proc/kmsg to it, so if you want to bind an getty to it you have to kill the cat first I guess.
I’ve made the initramfs with the slightly modified init script and added modules available. Bitbake recipes should appear in svn in the near future. Need to clean up my tree first. 
Thomas, your friendly neighborhood ArchDruid
PS: On an slightly related note. I hope SFR decides soon to open their branded A5 3G+ to an SDE, so that owners of those devices will be able to enjoy this too. They were selling the device for a couple of days for only 50€ free of contract, certainly a very nice offer.
PPS: use with an gen6 kernel only. Like e.g. this one