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This post aggregates some interesting information for those wanting to use the iriver Lplayer portable media player without the bundled iriverPlus software. It may be of use to those running an operating system other than Windows, or to Windows users who would like to avoid iriverPlus.

While all this is targeted at Lplayer owners, a lot of the information probably also applies to the device’s predecessors, the U10 and the Clix, as well as various other portable media players produced by iriver.

The following assumes that the Lplayer is set to the MSC (UMS) transfer mode, so that it may be used as a USB mass storage device. Thus, any modern operating system should identify it as an external hard drive.

Music

Because the Lplayer supports a myriad of formats, chances are it will play pretty much any audio file placed in its Music folder. Of course, there are also numerous formats that it doesn’t support. To get those to play, generally speaking, the easiest approach is to decode them to a WAV file and then encode that file to a supported format. The method for decoding obviously depends on the format of the source file, but for encoding, the following free cross-platform command line utilities may be useful:

• LAME is a popular MP3 encoder.

• The Vorbis tools contain oggenc for encoding to Ogg Vorbis.

• FLAC encodes to the lossless format of the same name.

A more common issue with music on the Lplayer is playlist creation. Most users’ playlists will probably be in the popular M3U format, which is unsupported at the time of this writing. Instead, the Lplayer uses iriver’s PLA format. The information gathered at this playlist specification for the iriver T50 still seems to apply. A Perl script is available to automatically turn M3U playlists into PLA ones, in the Playlists folder.

Videos

The Lplayer has support for MPEG4 SP, Xvid SP and WMV9 SP. Video files converted using iriverPlus will be in WMV9 SP format. Instead, FFmpeg may be used to convert most video files to Xvid SP files that the Lplayer can handle. The following command line options are recommended:

-f avi

creates an AVI file.

-vcodec mpeg4

creates an ISO MPEG4 video stream.

-vtag XVID

sets the FourCC to Xvid.

-profile 0

enables the Simple Profile (SP) option.

-b 384k

encodes the video stream at 384 kilobits per second.

-s 320x240

resizes the video stream to 320×240, implying a 4:3 aspect ratio.

-r 30

sets the video frame rate to 30 frames per second.

-acodec libmp3lame

creates an MP3 audio stream using LAME.

-ab 128k

encodes the audio stream at 128 kilobits per second.

-ar 44100

sets the audio sampling frequency to 44.1 kilohertz.

-ac 2

creates a 2-channel stereo audio stream.

Note that these options imply that support for all the necessary formats has been compiled into the FFmpeg executable. It may be necessary to compile or obtain an FFmpeg build that is able to decode the input file and/or encode to MPEG4 video and MP3 audio.

Firmware Upgrade

It may seem as though the only way to upgrade the Lplayer’s firmware is through iriverPlus’s menu. However, the fact of the matter is that the actions iriverPlus takes are relatively simple:

1. It downloads firmware.inf to obtain the latest version number.

2. If the player’s firmware is outdated, it downloads the U15.HEX firmware image from the URL listed in firmware.inf.

3. It places the downloaded file in the player’s System folder.

The player will not actually initiate the firmware upgrade unless U15.HEX is moved up one level. Regardless, performing the above steps manually is child’s play. Moreover, this simple Perl script even automates them.

Disclaimer

Most of this information was collected from some Google searches and a lot of fidgeting with my own Lplayer. I cannot be held accountable for any problems or damage caused by the information and software listed.

Update: You might also find my collection of LPlayer scripts useful.