Any firmware experts here? Media player related
 

G'day Folks,

I know this is a bit of a daft place to ask but I've been pleasantly surprised before when I've asked questions here about the eclectic non automotive side of life.

I have a media player that has space for an internal HDD. It is an xtreamer sidewinder 3. It is total ****...

...I get the impression, however, that the hardware is probably quite reasonable, but I'd like to have different firmware on it that will actually make it do what I'd like it to do!

All I want is a huge glorified MP3 player. The HDD is full of FLAC formatted songs - I've converted all my old CDs into FLAC. The audio out wires just plug into the back of my old amplifier and hey presto music quite often comes out of the speakers - but not for long.

The problem with the xtreamer is that there is loads of other crap on it for watching Russian porn and youtube and all that bollocks. More effort has been made to enable the viewing of Russian gash than there has been to access the HDD and just play an effing song. The file listing in "song mode" seems to be limited - probably to 255 songs which is pretty rubbish considering I've nearly got 750GB of FLAC files.

So I'd like to have a glorified MP3-like player that will enable me to list songs by genre, artist, album, rating etc just like a normal portable MP3 player but this time with access to my 1TB disc.

Instead of buying something that might be able to cope with this I'm thinking that a firmware change would be just as good if that was possible.

Does anyone know of a ready to go firmware solution?

Does anyone know of some software that will enable me to make up my own firmware?

I am not sure if it is exactly what you want but it sounds like you should build an XBMC box. XBMC | Open Source Home Theatre Software

OK thank you - I'll look into that.