The Rio Receiver was a home stereo device for playing

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

files stored on your computer's hard drive over an

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

HomePNA The HomePNA Alliance is an incorporated non-profit industry association of companies that develops and standardizes technology for home networking over the existing coaxial cables and telephone wiring within homes, so new wires do not need to be i ...

network. It was later rebranded and sold as the Dell Digital Audio Receiver. With a design derived from the existing

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

-based

Empeg Car The Empeg Car was one of the first in-car MP3 players developed. Originating in a personal project to build an in-car system that could perform MP3 playback in software, a British company called ''Empeg'' was formed in July 1998 to build a commerci ...

, it became popular among the Linux hacking community. The hardware consisted of a Cirrus Logic 7212 CPU ( ARM720T at 74 MHz), 1Mx32 (4 MB) of

EDO RAM Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...

, and either 512k×16 or 256k×16 (1 MB or 0.5 MB) of NOR flash used to boot. Audio output used a

Burr-Brown The Burr-Brown Corporation was an American technology company in Tucson, Arizona, which designed, manufactured, and marketed a broad line of proprietary, standard, high-performance, analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs) used in elec ...

PCM1716 DAC that drove line outputs, the headphone jack, and a Tripath class-D digital audio amplifier for speakers. Network connections were via either a Cirrus logic 8900A (10MBit Ethernet) or a Broadcom HomePNA 10

Mbit The megabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information. The prefix mega (symbol M) is defined in the International System of Units (SI) as a multiplier of 106 (1 million), and therefore :1 megabit = = = 1000 kilobits. The megabit h ...

/s chipset; if no Ethernet link was seen at boot time, the unit tried HomePNA. The user interface was a 128x64 pixel monochrome

LCD A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but in ...

with an EL

backlight A backlight is a form of illumination used in liquid crystal displays (LCDs). As LCDs do not produce light by themselves—unlike, for example, cathode ray tube (CRT), plasma (PDP) or OLED displays—they need illumination ( ambient light or a ...

, a rotary control with a push button, several buttons and IR remote control. The unit booted via a 2.2 linux kernel in flash which used

DHCP The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a cli ...

and SSDP to discover an NFS server from which it loaded a new kernel. The second kernel then mounted a root filesystem over NFS containing a small set of standard

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

tools and an application for selecting and playing music over the network, which was served using

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

by the Audio Receiver Manager software running on a Windows PC. Although the music player and the Audio Receiver Manager and Broadcom HomePNA kernel driver module were proprietary software, the kernel and other tools were open source. The two-step kernel boot process allowed rapid development of changes to the kernel allowing units to run new kernels by simply power cycling them; the use of standard protocols meant a variety of replacement software components could be developed independently.

External links

RRR Project
- Replacement Client Application by Reza Naima
RioPlay
- Open source project to replace the client and server side software
SlimRio
- Open source client software to interoperate with

SlimServer Logitech Media Server (formerly SlimServer, SqueezeCenter and Squeezebox Server) is a streaming audio server supported by Logitech (formerly Slim Devices), developed in particular to support their Squeezebox (network music player), Squeezebox rang ...

.
Jreceiver
- Open source host software to interoperate with various client modules for the rio receiver.

- Replacement client and server side software with FLAC, OGG and shoutcast support.
YARRS
- Yet Another Rio Receiver Server. Unix-based, free-software replacement server. {{Compu-hardware-stub Linux-based devices