A modest proposal for Meizu: open source the firmware!

I've had the M6 for about 10days now and so far I like it with reservations. The 2 biggest shortcomings I see are 1) the controls and 2) the firmware.

the touch strip is both too sensitive sometimes and too unresponsive other times. for ex, when I lift my finger, I often cause the selection bar to move. I have to use a very light touch and carefully lift my big thumb off the strip. Same thing with tapping; otherwise, I make the bar move before it registers the tap. on the other hand, tapping below the menu button or above the enter button to scroll almost never wotks the first time; I usually have to do it several times. and the 4 buttons are kinda mushy and feel a little flimsy. Not much they can do about this since it's mostly a hardware design, but I think if they add a sensitivity setting to the firmware that will help.

speaking of firmware, that seems to be the biggest complaint against the M6. I got all excited when I saw "new firmware" in this forum, but turned out it was just a return function (seriously, how long could that have taken to code? 1 hour?) I was hoping for the end-of-song bug fix at least. And look at the firmware feature request thread. 17 pages! I was going to add mine but I didn't bother because I figured whatever I want somebody else probably has already asked for.

I appreciate Meizu is a small company with limited resources and like any company they have to put the most effort into building new products and maximizing their market and revenues. (although I can't believe with 2 engineers working on the firmware there has been so little progress.) but anyway, here's my proposal: why not open source the firmware? harness the power of restless geeks out there and let them do the work for you. also, by having open source firmware, you immediately differentiate yourself from other DAPs and attract the slashdot-reading, linux-loving, C-and-ASM-coding-in- their-sleep crowd to your product. open it, and they will build!

let's face it, there's nothing really proprietary in that firmware, right? no big trade secret. where there are licensing issues, well, you could just leave those features out. you could release a firmware that doesn't even play MP3, for example, and let the hackers supply their solution. the toughest thing about doing something like the rockbox is reverse engineering the firmware and figuring out how the system works, right? It's not the features the players have like mp3 or divx. all that stuff is well known and available.

as for liability issues, you can state up front that you do not support non official firmware, and in fact, using non official firmware will void any warranty. at the same time, you state that any modified firmware released to the public must be open sourced, and you're free to pick out any good, popular, and well-tested features you like and incorporate them into the official firmware. happier users, and less work for you.

I think it makes a whole lot of sense.

I agree that opening the source of M6 firmware would be the way to go now.

Completely agree with all that.

/me prays that Mr. Wong will take this into consideration.

Take a look at Linksys (Cisco), Mr. Wong ! They have become the planet's leader in network router sales, by opening the source of their Linksys WRT54 router to the public. The community has developed a whole bunch of firmware replacements for it and therefore made it simply the best router available for the money.
What we see now is a big happy family of Linksys salesmen, developers and customers. This could happen with Meizu players as well.

The only reason I could see for this not to is, let's face it, it's communist China over there, and it would probably be considered treason to do it or something. Everyone's been hearing all about China lately with this Olympics buisiness going on.

I hope they can release it just fine, I mean, they can release the firmware to other countries, anyway, why not the source?

EDIT: By the way, people... I just took the time to write this up and send it to one of the people at Meizu that contacted me to help me figure out my problem, and is also the place I was told to send my sound bugs to.

Hi, this is DC once again. Have you head guys at Meizu Inc visited the Meizume forums yet? www.meizume.com/forums.php

Please read those forums, as you have hundreds of fans that are becoming disappointed in your current results in developing new firmware for the Meizu miniplayer M6. We believe you have given up on all of us that have bought your product, only to find the firmware is still full of bugs, like the unresolved sound bugs I sent to you and posted on the forums (ask Yankee about it).

We are all getting very disappointed in your latest firmware chaging nothing except a go back option in menus, and are getting very disappointed in having bought a player that is only going this far and then being dropped for something else before the bugs have even been worked out. Please either keep working on the firmware and doing a better job at it, or... we have a proposal for you:

Please read this topic here. A modest proposal for Meizu: open source the firmware!

If you are going to drop support on the firmware for the M6 miniplayers that are available now, we would like for you to look into this option, which would really benefit not only your customers and users, but you as well, as it would take much pressure off your development team, so that can concentrate on newer products. Please consider releasing the firmware for the M6 miniplayer as open source to the public and let them build upon it.

There is really no reason not to release the firmware. No other company can use your firmware because they are not using the same hardware, so your firmware code will not work in their devices. Your code won't be able to be used on anything other than your own miniplayer. You would be able to state that any use of unofficial firmware would void warranty if you wish to do that, and also be able to state that all firmware created by the open source community has to remain open source, with no profit or money being made by someone for making their own firmware for your players. Last, but not least, you can state that any firmware created by the open source community must be credited at least partially to you, the original creators of the firmware. I'm certain noone at all would mind following these guidelines when building upon your work.

Let the open source community join in and help you create even better firmware for what we consider to be potentially the greatest mp3 player around the world. Let us use your potential to help you achieve that goal!

We would really like to hear your input on this modest proposal from we, the customers and fans of your company, so please, let us know what your thoughts are about this.

Thank you very much for your time, and please... don't let down your fans!

Sincerely, DC, and the MeizuMe community

The address I sent this to is: sales at meizu.com Replacing the at with @ and no spaces. Not sure if this will make it to the head guys, but I say this is worth a shot, and I think maybe some of us should use our right to write to them and comment to them about their players and what they are doing. Every other company out there has thier own division just for questions, comments, and suggestions from their customers, so this has got to get somewhere. Let's hope they understand us as their customers and show them we really care about what they are doing.

Oh, and we should have a poll on this kind of thing. Actual numbers speak out to companies.

Could they at least release a sdk for specifications? Hell, we could turn it into an embedded operating system!...

No guys i don't think they would do this... if they do it other companys will base there mp3/4 player on it to....:'(

^not that it'd be a big difference, considering how utterly similar the player already is to the ipod and the like. Also, there are clones on the market; it wouldn't matter if they had the firmware, the crappy hardware would make any pmp a dead-paper-weight in a matter of days.

Open-sourcing this would not only take a large weight off of Meizu's back, but also save them development fees for incompetent/lazy work that would have otherwise solved most of our issues (audio playback, hello?).

"non official firmware will void any warranty"

^This should pretty much seal the deal as it does with such firmware hacks as Rockbox and the like. Meizu comes with a 1-year warranty, and I'm sure that they get plenty of returns based on firmware alone; seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Meizu players needs rockbox.

i totally agree on making this firmware open source, although i'm getting my M6 on monday i've been reading quite a lot on the firmware issues that they are having. It would be really good if Meizu actually made this firmware open source as there would be increased development by users themselves and to also take the load off the meizu engineers so that they can switch their focus onto the M8.
I'm sure we would all support this proposal into the movement of the Meizu M6 firmware into the Open Source Development right?

gilliu00_

DChronos wrote:

<<The only reason I could see for this not to is, let's face it, it's communist China over there, and it would probably be considered treason to do it or something. Everyone's been hearing all about China lately with this Olympics buisiness going on.>>

some may argue open source is communistic and anti-capitalist. anyway, having once lived in a communist country, I can tell you communists are geniuses at justifying anything they want to do as being perfectly in line with communist principles, even if it's a 180 degree turn from what they were doing before.

dravik wrote:

<<No guys i don't think they would do this... if they do it other companys will base there mp3/4 player on it to....:'(>>

M6's strength is the decent hardware at lower price. the firmware, let's face it, is a close copy of the ipod, nothing unique or revolutionary. if Meizu can clone the iphone, trust me, other companies can clone Meizu if they want to, with or without the firmware.

edit: if Meizu doesn't want to officially open source the firmware for legal or other reasons, they could "accidentally" leak it to the net and disavow any unauthorized use of the leaked source while looking the other way with respect to what the community does with it. hey, stuff happens, right?

If they make it public I'm mickey mouse...

It would be awsome if Meizu released the source. The quality of the firmware could increase exponentially. If they release the firmware under the GPL, lots of GPLed code could be used to improve the firmware. For example the video decoding could be enhanced using open-source code from the FFmpeg-project. (libavcodec)

yeah... going GPL would be great, I think most ppl don't realise how many coders are out there, that are longing for platforms that are open source. look at the open moko - the manufactor is just going to build the hardware, and code an simple OS - every other function is going to be written by the ppl itself.
that would be really a step forward... meizu would keep many satisfies customers, and woudn't have to bother it-self with bugfixes that we can solve on our own...

There really is no reason not to. Like I said, firmware has to be coded specifically for the exact hardware it is to run on. You cannot use it on other hardware, or hardware with a slightly different setup, because it would fail to run correctly.

The only way to get their firmware to run on something other than an M6 is to: completely rewrite it all to work with the hardware (pretty stupid because it wouldn't save anything compared to just writing firmware from scratch), or completely copying the M6 on the inside... same screen, same circuit board, same chips, same everything. That would violate copyrights, even in China.

We will see... i like mickey mouse so i hope they will give it:D

Now that they are focused on M8 they should open-source the firmware to boost the sales of M6, otherwise they'll drop because people are waiting for the 'new' product (even though it's a total different thing).

As far as I looked into the S2003.2 Firmware, they already make use of some open-source software. I found lots of references to sox (sox.sf.net) messages. The library is LGPL.

I doubt the M8 is gonna sell better than the M6 after it's released, at $300, and phone/internet/online/etc. functions that probably will be a looong time before they work outside China at all. Until they set a network for THEIR phone all around the largest places in the world, none of the online and wireless stuff will even work. You'll just be buying a $300+ mp3 and video player. They better plan on the M6 and M3 still being their main source of income in the international market, and doing what they are now sure as hell isn't going to insure that.

Originally Posted by DChronos

There really is no reason not to. Like I said, firmware has to be coded specifically for the exact hardware it is to run on. You cannot use it on other hardware, or hardware with a slightly different setup, because it would fail to run correctly.

The only way to get their firmware to run on something other than an M6 is to: completely rewrite it all to work with the hardware (pretty stupid because it wouldn't save anything compared to just writing firmware from scratch), or completely copying the M6 on the inside... same screen, same circuit board, same chips, same everything. That would violate copyrights, even in China.

You make a lot of assumptions on the code base for being someone who has never seen it. You have no idea if the functions that access the registers and channels on the hardware are independent and layered separately from the code for mp3 playing, etc. It really just depends on how they structured it. Although given the speed in releases chances are its a mess and most code accesses the hardware directly, yet its still bad to just simply assume this to be true.

So ya if they did release code I would love to help out but right now I'm not counting on it and I'm not about to pull my player open to attempt to find a way in since I'm not a Comp E., I'm just a Comp Sci student.