What is swan the project?

[miketowninc]

Can some one please take the time to tell me what the swan project is? thanks very much.

[Schopf]

Take a look here:

http://wiki.s1mp3.org/index.php/Swan

[miketowninc]

thanks, i tried to loook for it in wiki. thanks.cant wait for it to come out!!
Its for mp4 and mp3 right?

[Schopf]

Yes, but it will take 2 years or more to have something running fine and usefull

[sirius]

"Yes, but it will take 2 years or more to have something running fine and usefull"

Two years have passed and project stands still. Actually I was tracing progress for very long, trying to contribute, and some time ago I just left. Now I just dropped in to check what's up, and everything is exactly the same as I left it a year ago... I think it's about the time to say what I was going to say a long time ago- there are no chances that project will be finished ever. Those chinese mp3 players are mostly trashed now, all the new hardware changed a lot, and actually most people use players embedded in their mobile phones. Development progress is too slow and live is way too fast and too short.

Probably it is my last post on this forum and in subject of The Swan Project; so goodbye and wish developers good luck.
Sirius

[Schopf]

Swan project is dead and I may point a few factors to that:

1 - Mp3/mp4 players are very cheap now and people can just drop them away, even working.
2 - Hardware changed a lot and project couldnt math with that.
3 - There was/is a lack of knowledge about mp3 players operation.
4 - There is no interest in making mp3 players doing other things than play music/movies.
5 - You may find small devices which will do what you need.
6 - People will spend too much time and effort to have a bit more than nothing running in their devices.

So, dont wait nothing more from Swan. WiRe gave up too. Take a look in http://www.s1mp3.de

I think it was a good project 4-5 years ago. Now, it doesnt make sense anymore.

[wladston]

Agree.

But still, I find that it could be a nice learning task to do Swan, considering there are no good open source 8-bit kernels, it might be good to the community too.

The project is dead, but as long as 8-bit machines are cheaper to manufacture than 16-bit machines, I have hopes on it. Even if 16-bit machines become cheaper than 8-bit machines, I belive that smaller nanocomputers with 8-bit will be easier to manufacture. So I still have my unchanged interest for Swan and any other 8-bit open source kernel

sirius, I think you should consider that too.

[ian_hawdon]

Yeah, it's a shame the project never really got further than a pipedream. But on the plus side, we helped millions of users get their players up and running again after a bad firmware upgrade! (myself included!)
On the plus side, if it wasn't for this project, I probably would never have heard of the Rockbox project ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ) which I use pretty much everyday on my iPod!
I think SWAN would have worked, if all the S1 players were wired the same (or very similar), it was that that caused development to be slow, and I think we came to the sad realisation that there are literally millions of players branded as "S1 Mp3 Player" all with totally different hardware layouts!