[Febs]

One of the Rockbox developers, Buschel, has made great strides over the past month in battery life improvements for Rockbox on PortalPlayer-based players, which include iPods. His improvements have been particularly successful for the iPod Video, because he owns that platform himself and has also had the help of others (including myself) to test his changes. His improvements have not yet been incorporated into the official Rockbox builds, but I expect that they will be any day now.

Buschel has hit a bit of a roadblock with respect to doing the same sort of testing for the iPod Color/Photo because he does not own an iPod Color or Photo and has had difficulty locating testers. There are 11 separate builds that Buschel is trying to test. If you are a Rockbox user with one of these players and willing to do some testing, please visit this thread on the Rockbox forums and follow the links to the download page for the test builds. Buschel is looking for the following information with respect to each of the 11 builds:

- does it start?
- does it play audio?
- does it start, but does not update LCD?

 

[Caribou679]

An ipod video 5th generation with longer battery life??!! Are you serious!
I am strongly considering selling my ipod 30gb video. Almost completed the deal!
can you let us know when this build will be available?

Hope you find volunteer for the 4th gen!

regards

 

[Luminette]

he's talking of extended battery life from old rockbox to new rockbox. it is, as far as i know, still an overall lower battery life than you would have with your ipod video in norm.

 

[Caribou679]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Luminette /img/forum/go_quote.gif he's talking of extended battery life from old rockbox to new rockbox. it is, as far as i know, still an overall lower battery life than you would have with your ipod video in norm.

Any significative improvement over the current 7 hours with Rockbox would make me consider keeping the ipod!

regards,

 

[Febs]

The testing builds are available now through the link that I provided in the original post. I got close to 16 hours with my 60 GB iPod video under testing conditions (which basically involves starting playback and letting it run. The runtime would obviously be less under real-life conditions where one is browsing files, using the backlight, etc.)

I suspect these changes will be incorporated into the official builds very soon. My guess is that they will be committed within a matter of days if the decision is made to commit the changes for the iPod Video before testing is complete on some of the other platforms, longer otherwise. As always, though, it's impossible to make any firm predictions, since people develop Rockbox in their spare time.

 

[LDMES]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Caribou679 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Any significative improvement over the current 7 hours with Rockbox would make me consider keeping the ipod! regards,

From the looks of it reading through the Rockbox site on the work Buschel's doing, A 60GB 5G increased in Battery Life to 13h51m.

You can find all about it here:

All PP502x Targets - Device Disable Testing Build (SVNr15975 & FS#8379 DDv14)

and here:

FS#8379: power consumption issues PP502x/5G

Febs: It would be great if you could post it when they finally accept this patch and make it part of the current builds. Thanks

 

[PouncePony]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Febs /img/forum/go_quote.gif I got close to 16 hours with my 60 GB iPod video under testing conditions

Febs,

What were you getting with the stock daily builds for run time?

Thanks.

 

[direcow]

I'm already on it, and have posted some findings

 

[PouncePony]

Quote:

Originally Posted by direcow /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm already on it, and have posted some findings

For which player?

 

[direcow]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PouncePony /img/forum/go_quote.gif For which player?

ipod 4G color

 

[warrior05]

Oh, man - this is very exciting! I've been seriously thinking going back to Rockbox and now I definitely will be! Thanks much to the OP for starting this thread!

 

[direcow]

the new builds are very promising! ~9 hours of FLAC... Let's see how much more we can optimise my 4G...

 

[subfocus]

This looks interesting .... give me a decent battery life for Rockbox with the 5.5g and I may actually start using my Ipod again .

 

[freeone-j]

So if I wanted to extract a patch to my 4th Photo color, would I use the most recent one, do the size of the patch matter? Also if I run into a problem, I could just extract current build (overwrite), right? This is new to me!

 

[direcow]

Quote:

Originally Posted by freeone-j /img/forum/go_quote.gif So if I wanted to extract a patch to my 4th Photo color, would I use the most recent one, do the size of the patch matter? Also if I run into a problem, I could just extract current build (overwrite), right? This is new to me!

you need to get a patched build from soap, or build your own...

if there's a problem, just overwrite! things should be fine again