iriver firmware update -to rockbox or not to rockbox?

You can have both installed at the same time and dual boot. I did that for a while and now I only use rockbox. Rockbox is better because you can customize more aspects and because you can play lossless files like flac. There is also an active community making it better little by little. In contrast iRiver very very rarely upgrades its firmware. The iRiver firmware, limited though it is, is rock solid. It's not a big deal to try rockbox for a while and if you don't like it, (you have to get used to using different buttons for different things and it's somewhat buggier) change back to iRiver. Go for it.

Ahah! Thanks for the answers folks, I was reading through forums and the like, but it's much better to read answers here! I've upgraded the iriver firmware and I'll use rockbox too, I didn't quite realise that they weren't mutually exclusive.

i switched to rockbox and its better. its boots quicker and has all kinds of little customizable features--on the fly playlists, play on startup, a better shuffle, different font sizes, etc etc.

To tell you something you probably already know, the http://forums.rockbox.org/ forums are quite good, and the http://www.misticriver.net/ forums are great for all things iRiver-related. (Just gossip: I'm soon to install a 60-gig hard drive in my H-140, following the example of several Misticriver users.)

Using Rockbox invalidates the warranty. I recently had to return an H340 under warranty after 14 months, and the replacement looks like it's going back too. Don't know how easy it would have been to disguise if I had used Rockbox.

I listen to a lot of lengthy podcasts, and Rockbox is essential for the bookmark feature. I'm shocked more MP3 players don't support this.

I loaded up Rockbox and it works fine except that it says that none of my files have codecs (it goes through every file in a directory telling me that). The files work fine with iriver's firmware. I guess I'd better take it to the rockbox forums...

Forgive me if I'm asking an obvious question, but you extracted the .rockbox directory to the root of your iRiver's hard drive, right? The rockbox.iriver (I hope I'm remembering the name correctly) file requires the contents of the .rockbox folder in order to work properly.

I have used Rockbox for years, first on Archos and now on iPod and iRiver. I've never had the problem you describe with missing codecs... unless you have DRM'd WMA files (such as Napster/Rhapsody/PlaysForSure downloads), in which case the Rockbox firmware will be unable to decode these files. What kind of files are you trying to play? Some of the best things you can do with the Rockbox'd iRiver: Oggs and FLACs Soduku, Tetris, Chess, Doom, Gameboy Gapless and crossfade tracking mixing Bookmarking for all tracks (as noted above) Customised, personalised Playing Now ("WPS") screens On-device playlist management Pitch shifting