This would be nice, but...

Posted Jun 24, 2006 12:12 UTC (Sat) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341)
In reply to: This would be nice, but... by nix
Parent article: Indie Podcasting with Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

It really depends on your audience, though. Do you honestly think that Joe RandomCollegeKid is gonna install unsupported software on their iPod, void their warranty, and run the risk of bricking the whole thing, just to listen to a podcast?

Fat chance. Somebody who's not already interested in hacking their iPod most likely won't do it - instead, they'll just not listen to your podcast. So unless your target audience pretty much exclusively consists of hackers, using any format that a stock iPod cannot play will just cause you to lose your audience (or at least a significant part of it).

This would be nice, but...

Posted Jun 29, 2006 12:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This turns out not to be the case :)

Firstly, there is zero risk of bricking the iPod unless you do something *really* stupid: this isn't a flashing process, it's all just disk writes. If you follow the instructions, it's trouble-free.

Secondly, we see a *lot* of non-technical random users doing just that. (Admittedly for the iPod the huge flood of blind users Rockbox has seen for other platforms isn't so likely to turn up, because with its non-tactile scroll wheel the iPod really is rather blind-unfriendly, but still there are a significant number of users for a still-unreleased port.)