Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at running
Rockbox on an iPod. "Over the past few years, I've been ripping
my CD collection to Ogg Vorbis, intending to one day find a portable player
for all those tracks of synthpop, reggae, and comedy. Now I've finally
found a player for my 60-or-so gigs of Ogg files which has the the
ergonomics, battery life, and accessory market of the iPod. The secret to
having a player that deals with so many codecs, but that looks and acts
like an iPod, is that it is an iPod -- just one that I converted last night
with a firmware swap to run the excellent, open source system called
Rockbox. Rockbox isn't perfect -- and it sure isn't for everyone -- but I'm
pleased as punch with it."
(Log in to post comments)
Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge) Posted Apr 14, 2006 21:29 UTC (Fri) by dreadnought (guest, #27222) [Link] This is cool but looks to be more work than needed. I have a Samsung YP-T6 and I am pretty sure it supports Ogg. Infact I recall being surprised by the packaging mentioning it and it factored heavily in the purchase decision although I havent put any Oggs on it yet. You cant beat the feature set as its got a voice recorder, a fm tuner, a fm tuner recorder, a mp3 line in encoding port! And it acts exactly like a USB thumb drive. Did I mention its also inexpensive?
Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge) Posted Apr 14, 2006 23:41 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] Rockbox plays 9 codecs (vastly more than any proprietary firmware that I'm aware of) with two more in development. Rockbox has FM tuner capability, FM recording, lossless PCM recording, on-device encoding to MP3/WavPack, tons of games (including a Game Boy emulator and Doom), PDA functionality and more.The weakest aspect so far is the somewhat spartan user interface (at least compared to the flashy Apple firmware). That's being worked on and it can be improved greatly from what you see after the default install through the myriad customization options. We're working on a 3.0 release now (I'm just a very minor participant, not a core dev) so we're in code freeze mode. After that you'll begin to see a flurry of new features getting merged.
Good, but not good enough Posted Apr 17, 2006 9:30 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I see on the Samsung product page that it supports ogg alright. However, there are some limitations which might become irritating.The voice recorder only seems to record to MP3. Well, it could be useful as a portable recorder if it recorded without compression; sound quality is probably not very good, but the line-in connection could be used with a good preamp and a mike. I'm looking for a replacement for my minidisc, which is awful, but everything I find is overpriced or lousy. Maybe free firmware could turn this device into a good solution. Also, on the Australian product page (?) it says: "Record straight from FM Radio *", the small print reads "*(subject to copyright restrictions)". Which restrictions? I would guess some kind of broadcast flag. But the same note appears in "Record straight from CD or other external source - no PC required *". Since copyright is established by law and laws are interpreted and applied by courts and judges, I would prefer if my MP3 player would abstain from enforcing it; free firmware could come in handy.
Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge) Posted Apr 15, 2006 23:24 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] Do any readers know how RockBox impacts battery life on iPods with flash storage? I have the very first revision of iPod, the 5GB with scroll wheel, and iPod Linux kills the battery life of that model. I have yet to try alternate firmware for the iPod nano.
Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge) Posted Apr 16, 2006 0:02 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] According to http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodRuntime, the iPod nano lasts between 7.5 and 8.5 hours when playing high bitrate Ogg Vorbis files. I think I've read that the iPod ports don't have much in the way of battery optimization yet, but I don't own an iPod so I can't say firsthand.The iPod ports are considered to be beta quality, so don't expect a totally polished product just yet.
Vorbis Q8? Posted Apr 16, 2006 8:09 UTC (Sun) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] This chart seems to corroborate an earlier posted statement that 256kbits/s Vorbis is supported under RockBox on iPods, because (if I understand correctly!) that's roughly the rate that corresponds to Q8. I wonder why iPodLinux's status page still claims only 128Kbits/s...
Vorbis Q8? Posted Apr 16, 2006 14:52 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] iPodLinux has nothing to do with Rockbox. While the developers sometimes share hardware specs and low-level iPod chipset information, the two are completely separate codebases. Don't assume that because something works with one project it should work with the other.
On-the-fly conversion seems adequate Posted Apr 17, 2006 17:28 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] While it would be nice to be able to play my .ogg files natively, gnupod supports on-the-fly conversion to mp3 which seems adequate. I'm hesitant to do too much fiddling with the bundled firmware on the ipod.
On-the-fly conversion seems adequate Posted Apr 18, 2006 15:42 UTC (Tue) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] Converting oggs to mp3s defeats the point as far as I'm concerned.The guruboolez tests show that ogg vorbis compression at 96kbit has higher audio quality than the world's best mp3 compression at 128kbit. If you convert your oggs to mp3, you lose the quality advantages of the ogg format and gain all the quality disadvantages of the mp3 format. On an iPod nano, lower bitrate matters, since the nano has only 4 GB of space. There is no other flash-based player available right now that has more space. So you're pretty much stuck using Rockbox and ogg vorbis on the nano if you want to get the most out of the nano's limited disk space.
|
|||||||||||||