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.
update: *fanfare* … and the grand prize for solving our little crypto-mystery goes to Neuromancien! Congratulations!
PS: This AES key let’s you unpack AOS update files. It however does not allow you to sign update files, for that there is an (already known) RSA key for which the private key is a well kept secret. But that is an solved problem, you just ignore it. How? Find out soon, same place, same station.
So, here is what you’ve been waiting for. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible. Though currently you’ll have to bring some previous Linux command line experience.
With the help of Archos we have prepared a few binaries you are free to download and use on your gen7 devices.
UPDATE: Fixed an issue where the wifi was deactivated. Now the ti-load script always enables wifi. Also the libssl package form the Ångström repository which is needed for wpa_supplicant is now included. – Thanks to johnsq for bringing those to my attention.
Before you start you need to copy one or two files while running Android (or mount the ubifs, but that is probably not possible under stock SDE) the most important file is /data/misc/wifi/wlanconf.nvs and – if you want to have the wireless networks configured under android – also the wpa_supplicant.conf file located in the same directory. Just put them somewhere on /storage.
To start wifi you have to cd to “/home/root/wifi/” and run “./ti-load”. Then you can start wpa_supplicant as follows. (I’ll assume you left it where you put it under android. Please delete the first line in that file with an editor, else it won’t work!) “wpa_supplicant -Dwext -itiwlan0 -c/mnt_data/wpa_supplicant.conf
Now it should start spitting out all sorts of messages and connect to your AP.
Now while wpa_supplicant is running you can issue “udhcpc -i tiwlan0″ (that’s tiwlan[ZERO]) to obtain an DHCP lease and establish an IP network connection.
Congratulations!
A few more words:
WiFi works for our user Ian58
Something I wanted to write about already a few days ago but didn’t manage for private reasons.
We have the tiwlan driver working under Ångström. Currently we use the kernel module from the Archos Android image and userspace binaries kindly provided by Archos. I was told that the goal is to have an working (possibly newer version) GPL of driver and userspace. TI has its driver available as source for their ZOOM development platform, there might be slight differences to the Archos hardware though. I was informed that part of the code is already dual licensed GPL/Apache, thus a binary release is fine before anyone asks, the further source is under investigation and parties involved are hopeful to have an OSS release soon.
I will be updating this posting later today with the binaries and hopefully a script to get the essential data out of the device (each has specific calibration data).
update: As the whole writeup got a little longer I’ve put it in a second posting.