Ogg

Posted Feb 2, 2006 9:04 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: Some Rockbox updates

Postings elsewhere (thanks linuxstb) reveal that the Rockbox port has been demonstrated to play 260 kbit/s Vorbis encodings reliably on the Nano. This is twice the rate claimed on the iPodLinux wiki, which leads me to suspect that wiki entry is simply obsolete. In any case, good news for Nano owners.

Hardware like the Nano (and suchlike) would be a lot more appealing if, in place of soldered-in flash memory, it had a CompactFlash or similar slot. The only such hardware I have been able to locate, that claim to be able to play Vorbis out of the box, are the Lexar Media LDP-800 and the MPIO FL100, neither (to my knowledge) in current production. Sandisk, Kuro, and Frontier Labs have had slot gadgets without Vorbis support. Of equal interest would be a memoryless gadget that would play files from any USB key, but I haven't found any such. Rockbox drivers for SD/MMC/CF or USB hosting would be a necessity to support any of these.

The problem with the fragmented MP3 player business is that there are too few people with any particular gadget to motivate a port.

Ogg

Posted Feb 2, 2006 13:01 UTC (Thu) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

Are you not forgetting the iRiver H3xx series? These are also not in current production put play oggs out of the box.

Ogg

Posted Feb 2, 2006 17:41 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

The iriver H3xx series have hard disk drives, and cost more than 6 times as much as your typical memoryless player.

I have since learned of Sandisk and Lexar products (MP3 Companion and MPC-231 JumpGear MP3, respectively) that accept a (matching) USB key. Unfortunately neither decodes Vorbis, and neither got very good reviews. There's also a jWIN JX-MP93 gadget that takes SD cards, but again no Vorbis. It almost seems as if anybody who obtains the rights to implement WMA DRM agrees not to support Ogg alongside.

A Rockbox port for any of these (typically US$40-60) gadgets would be most welcome.