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.
I’ve seen several cases where people report in to Archos related forums with an broken hard-drive. In most cases the firmware is Archos original, so it won’t accept a new hard-drive. You can install the firmware but it will refuse to boot…
Archos will replace the hard-drive on most of their units for a fee. There are some constraints though. As far as I know they will only replace it with identical capacity drives and it takes time to send the device in.
Today Archosfans user peterq finally confirmed unwittingly what I was suspecting all along:
If your original hard-drive failed you can swap the hard-drive yourself and get an working unit also with AVOS by then installing the SDE and subsequently flashing our Boot-Menu!
This comes also with some drawback: if your device is still covered by an Archos granted warranty then this is void. There is no way to hack the boot-loader to enable full write to flash – but besides for an custom boot logo, what would you need that for?
Also you will need to create the hidden partition yourself and populate it with the contents of an Archos firmware upgrade file. But that sure should still beat not having your Archos for a month, right?
To sum up. Good news for all Archos5 and Archos7 owners if their hard-drive ever dies!
If you have some time on your hands to play around: Please send in your guide how to create an hidden partition from scratch on an gen6 device. I might prepare another post on how to create the hidden partition from scratch myself, but that is very low on my priority list unless someone wants to motivate me buy “buying me a beer or two”.
UPDATE: Problem solved! See peterq’s answer to my suggestion. All you need to do is to install an regular firmware first (don’t worry that it doesn’t boot!) and then proceed with the regular guide to installing the boot menu.
PS: I suspect this will also work on gen7, Archos5IT units but don’t have it confirmed.
After spending most of the weekend reimplementing the init-script and cutting out everything that needed Archos binaries I spent this whole monday adapting the bitbake recipes and fixing minor bugs.
Ladies and Gentlemen! I present the public beta version of the openAOS Boot Menu for generation 7 hardware!
The openAOS Boot Menu now runs on 7th generation Archos devices!
As this is just a beta version (in the true meaning of this word!) some functionality around it is still missing. For now you have to set up most things yourself. For today just a short introduction (prerequisite is an Linux PC and an unpacked Archos Android firmware):
tar -xvzf /mnt_data/ubitools.tar.gzchattr -c /mnt_data/androidroot.cramfs.securechattr -c /mnt_data/bitmapfs.cramfs.secure./ubidetach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 5./ubiformat /dev/mtd5 -y./ubiattach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 5 -d 0 -O 2048 Make sure you get that right: …-d [ZERO] -[CAPITAL-O]…./ubimkvol /dev/ubi0 -N system -mmkdir /mnt/ubimount -t ubifs -o rw ubi0:system /mnt/ubicp /mnt_data/androidroot.cramfs.secure /mnt/ubi/cp /mnt_data/bitmapfs.cramfs.secure /mnt/ubi/The final version will hopefully automate 99% of the above process. If you know some shell scripting and want to help. Please let me know. I won’t have much time over the next few weeks myself.
PS: I should have mentioned that you can of course also generate an script put it onto your device together with the other four files in step 3 and then run it instead of step 10. /bin/sh script
PPS: I’m working on an clean commit of the sources used to build the files. Please allow me a day or two as I currently have other priority tasks.