ipod 5g 60B + rockbox + FLAC = WOW!!!
Jun 23, 2006 at 9:08 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 71
h-man

h-man

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I have just installed the latest rockbox build to my 5g ipod video, patched it with album art etc... and filled it with eac-converted flac files, and have spent the last 2-3 hours (with e4c) being amazed at the improvement over the (already quite good) Apple firmware. The biggest gain seems to be elimination of the background hiss altogether (sorry Duncan, the radio remote didn't do it for me), along with the support for gapless. I hate to say it, but if only the battery life could be improved, I think I may have found my ultimate portable source....
 
Jun 23, 2006 at 9:59 PM Post #2 of 71
wavpack 4.31 transcode to save space. better, faster, stronger, smaller and supported.
 
Jun 25, 2006 at 2:04 AM Post #5 of 71
be patient regarding rockbox and battery life. it hasn't even been beta released but they've been doing a real good job with it. i update mine (i have a 4g color soon to be imod'ed) nearly everyday and i've noticed continual improvements. life from a single charge is still relatively short but it'll come. november is the current expected release of the beta but hopefully battery issues will be tended to before then.

yeah, gapless FLAC playback is just awesome. i will never go back. i've been very impressed with rockbox and the group of developers. yeah, it's a little flaky but for a pre-beta it rocks!
 
Jun 25, 2006 at 12:28 PM Post #10 of 71
Quote:

Originally Posted by Nick B
From what I have been reading, I thought the opposite was true?


IIRC, Rockbox increases battery life on all models EXCEPT the iPods. Supposedly when they are finished, Rockbox will actually give better battery life than the Apple firmware.
 
Jun 26, 2006 at 12:33 AM Post #12 of 71
well it is not just the ipod that gets worse battery life with rockbox. as far as i know, only the archos, and the irivers recently received a boost in battery life. this is one thing to look out for because a higher drain on the battery leads to faster battery cycles which means shorter battery life in the long run.

since the ipod doesnt have a whole lot of hardware features (like radio, voice record, line in record) i'm not sure it loses much with rockbox, except of course itunes sync and smart playlists, etc.
 
Jun 26, 2006 at 10:28 PM Post #14 of 71
Quote:

Originally Posted by biggulp
Rockbox can only get the CPU to run 100% of the time, without scaling it down for less intensive usage. That's why the battery life suffers compared to the original firmware.


Actually the ipod ports of Rockbox already support CPU frequency scaling so that it doesn't have to run full tilt all the time. The problem is that Rockbox currently only uses one of the two CPU cores and that the codecs could stand to be better optimized. This means that while playing music, especially if you're using things like the equalizer or crossfeed, the CPU never has a chance to run at lower speeds.

Also, some of the hardware may not be properly initialized by Rockbox since there are no docs for the hardware, this could cause some components to drain the battery unneccessarily. This was actually the battery drain problem that was recently fixed on the iriver h300, the USBOTG chip hadn't been properly turned off and was doing nothing while drawing a similar amount of power as the CPU. This one fix alone nearly doubled the runtime on the h300.
 
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