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work on ipod mini??? I would like to do it on my ipod mini!

You could always RTFA.

FTFA: Page 1, line 8:
There are installation instructions for all flavors of the iPod on the iPodLinux project wiki.

Yes, iPodLinux is currently running on 5G iPods. I think the screen refresh rate is currently pretty low, so it's not that useful just yet. They'll probably fix the problem soon, and then you wide-screen iPod people can be playing iDoom with the rest of us :) Read more: http://ipodlinux.org/ -Dash

Yes it does. I have it working on my 1st gen Mini. Im using Flydzilla too. I also have a game Boy emulator and several ROMs. You shoule be able to do the same using info from those sites below:
http://www.dansfloyd.com/help.html
http://ipodlinux.org/4G_Installer
http://ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6099

Yes it does. I have it working on my 1st gen Mini. Im using Flydzilla too. I also have a game Boy emulator and several ROMs. You shoule be able to do the same using info from those sites below:
http://www.dansfloyd.com/help.html
http://ipodlinux.org/4G_Installer
http://ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6099

How about a Linux iPod? http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page

This may be off topic but how good is ipodlinux http://ipodlinux.org/ (the linux kernel on the ipod)?
Is it legal? And would it work with itunes?

Hey! That's your problem! Obviously you're not running Linux on your iPod.

The iPod doesn't use a CPU to decode anything it plays; it's all done by an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) which handles the mp3, AAC, WAV, Apple-lossless, etc decompression.

I suspect that the power used to decode equal-bitrate MP3 and AAC files is imperceptible...

Hi, I work on the iPodlinux project. Instead of spewing bullshit as fact, I suggest you do a little research. All iPods except the shuffle have dual ARM7TDMI cores that do all of their audio decoding. The iPod video has a BCM chip in addition for video stuff. They do not use ASICs.

I don't know how it is with the codecs Apple are using, but in our decoding stuff AAC uses less CPU than MP3. They can decode MP3 @ 33Mhz on both cores (clockable up to a theoretical max of 90Mhz) and its around the same or lower with AAC. Lossless is probably less (the open source version of ALAC isn't very optimised, however), but it requires longer disk access (less of a problem with solid state memory).

Please don't spew bullshit.

Apple's IPods already play music from services other than their ITune's store

Ogg, Wavpack, FLAC and MPC can all be played on Ipod (Color/Photo and Nano only for now) thanks to the recent Rockbox firmware port
No only that but with Rockbox ibloat is no longer needed (or any other special software for that matter) to load/unload audio files

And this has been made possible by the work of the iPodLinux Project.

Well, I beleive that you could run Linux on a nano.
I run iPodLinux on my 4G 20GB iPod.

http://ipodlinux.org/

It's because it doesn't run linux...

I think you'll find you're mistaken.

These glasses look pretty cool. I've been trying to get my hands on a pair of the "new age" of small form displays. Why have an LCD monitor? Why not have a totally mobile monitor setup? Just plop on your display, and voila! These don't look like those crappy full-face helmets. They are sleek and interesting.

These things aren't "3D virtual reality glasses"; they are small-form, optical LCD displays. And it's not like they just plopped an LCD up either... they have tiny lenses in front of the display that allow your eyes to focus correctly and look at this thing for hours on end, just like you were staring at your monitor that's sitting two feet away. It's brilliant stuff.

Combine this with an OQO or other such portable device, and you have a totally mobile computing platform. Or why not just use Ipod Linux...

- DaftShadow

Reset the Nano by holding Select and Menu. When the apple splash screen shows up, release both buttons and immediately press select and play/pause. This will put it into "hard drive mode".

Linky

You actually CAN record audio on an older ipod without any accessories. Just a standard Microphone, (or if you're really desperate, your left ear bud.)
the magic to all of this? Linux on iPod. http://ipodlinux.org/.
the quality goes all the way up to 96 Kbps mono.
http://ipodlinux.org/Manual#Recording

You actually CAN record audio on an older ipod without any accessories. Just a standard Microphone, (or if you're really desperate, your left ear bud.)
the magic to all of this? Linux on iPod. http://ipodlinux.org/.
the quality goes all the way up to 96 Kbps mono.
http://ipodlinux.org/Manual#Recording

I know in the past it was choppy with ogg vorbis playback. But I would think with the new iPod photo and video players, it will surely have enough horsepower for Ogg.

Unfortunately, they have limited features working on the newer models. I'm a sucky programmer, but maybe there are some others out there who could contribute...

Not yet, but I'm sure it will soon...

http://ipodlinux.org

The gist of the original article is that Apple used to charge only for use of the logo, but now wants to charge for the right to connect to the iPod. What they claim they are charging for is a "marketing program" where the docking connector isn't going to go away like the headphone control connector did on the latest version. That's called "blackmail". "Pay me not to change my design on you every six months".

The connector is proprietary -- rights belong to JAE, not Apple, and JAE will apparently sell you the connector.

For info on the pinout, see here. There's a link to a guy who will sell you ones and twos so you don't even have to buy the minimum lots JAE wants to sell.

For Apple to tell people that they have to pay to connect to an iPod is ridiculous. To say they have to pay for using a logo is fine.

It's no wonder you have trouble finding "OGG" support. There's no such thing. The post you replied to got it right: it's "Ogg".

Too, you really can get Ogg/Vorbis support on older iPods (now very cheap, on eBay), thanks to the excellent crew at http://ipodlinux.org/. Yes, it will dual-boot. Booting under Linux you can transfer files directly from yours to anybody else's, whatever they are running. I don't know whether you can install linux on them that way, but if you can it would be the polite thing to do when you get connected.

Without that software we'd be adding song ratings on the ipod itself

Assuming Ratings were not available (they are!), let me tell you how I'd do it in Media Center, my favourite jukebox software.

Define new custom tag: MyRating. Click the radio button so "MyRating" embeds within files and updates during Library changes.
Optionally: set it to update Library setting from device files setting, if newer.
Create new Smartlist with MyRating >=3, say.
Synch.
That's about it.

Of course, you would have to create the Smartlists using MC itself and define the playback statically because the iPod is a closed system with very little configurability available to the end user. For myself, I prefer more control over my playback devices, and the option of open source.

does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies? Not really.

Box Office is a money loser for Hollywood. It breaks even on DVDs and cleans up tidily with TV and syndication. The box office kabuki is just to add a bit of pizzazz to the TV launch. And in fact, the Box is declining rapidly and becoming more and more of a liability. The release window has now shrunk to 3 months or so for Thanksgiving movies. The studios make no money from popcorn sales, which is all the multiplexes care about, and most of them went bankrupt several years ago anyway. It's a death spiral.

their clumsiness, and their poor interface.

One word: Shuffle.

Two years brings a lot of changes. At the time he was busy dissing those players, there were 1GB players available. In fact, a player I have from that era now takes 2GB cards. I like progress. Progress is good. The nano represents progress of a sort for Apple - I think absorbing most of the Creative mp3 player design team has worked out well. It's nice that Apple finally has a pretty good, albeit quite expensive, flash player, even if it did take it a few years to get it right.

But there are other players since then that have advanced significantly, adding video, games, emulators, PDA functions, wireless, expansion, and so on. For myself, I like my personal media tech to push the envelope, and to not be so hostile to open-source firmware enhancements.

I'll take your word for the video. I don't really spend "probably on average 75-80% of my waking day" on the Internet, but let me see...

There will be no video iPod anytime soon. Only Airport AV. The only way the iPod gets to play at this stage is by being a remote for the expected Airport AV.

That's not entirely correct...

[URL]http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player%5B/URL%5D
[URL]http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/09/ how_to_play_video_on_ipods_wit.html%5B/URL%5D

iPod Linux allows some form of video iPod at least =)

Got there just before me anyway linkage http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player

"The movie industry still doesn't get "it". People won't buy something that is crippled."

I know! the best example of this is the failure of the itunes music store. I don't know anyone why has bought a song on itunes. All my friends agree that DRM music is crippled and substandard. Apparently apple is only making pennies profit on a song. They are losing money people! Pretty soon ipod owners will have nothing to listen to on their ipods. I suggest everyone flash their ipods with linux. This is the only way we can fight vendor lock in! The corporate attempts at controling our music freedom must be stopped. Continuing the boycott of crippled media is the only way we can vote with our wallets! Only then will they get it!!!

Well, there are easier ways of playing video on existing ipods.

The point that things like this and this demonstrate, is that Pocket is the New Platform.

Apple are pretty savvy to this. iPod nano is a keyboard and mouse interface away from being a Classic.. its not unusual that the same sort of 'monolith screen slab' form factor of the original Mac is still resonant in their current design path.

But now, it fits in your pocket. And it won't be long until the LED projector segment shrinks to the same form-factor, and we'll see, perhaps, even the death of laptops ..

[.. there's nothing quite so cool as having torrent in your pocket ..]

There is a plug-in for most major desktop music players to allow iPod access (WinAMP for example. This site claims the iPod is supported by iTunes, WinAmp, Musicmatch, WMP, and Real.). There are also groups who have ported Linux to the iPod (like iPodLinux) and their efforts open up a wide variety of features and capabilities including ogg support.

Taft

full colour and sound too http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player

The iPod Photo probably can't decode H.264, but it's certainly capable of playing video.

I'm holingout for the iPod Femto.

That said, ipodlinux.org has been working on a video player...

http://ipodlinux.org/Video_player

They also have a working Doom port. Neither is quite perfect yet. I have a feeling that there is considerable room for improvement, but I've only just started to look through the source, and the iPod's LCD interface is surprisingly baroque for somebody used to having either easy access to a frame buffer, or mature accelerated video drivers... :(

I don't think anybody has done anything with the TV encoder chip on the Photo. Personally, what I'd like to see is a video player app that doesn't use the LCD, but just goes straight to the TV encoder, and can play decently compressed video. This would allow me to carry quite a lot of TV on my iPod Photo, and easily plug it ito a TV wherever I happen to be to watch it.

I only skimmed the docs, but the interface to the TV encoder actually looks a bit less baroque, so in theory it might work better than trying to play to the LCD. OTOH, the TV encoder apparently expects higher resolution, so it may be a loss overall for performance. :(

Features??? all they can do is play music... that's all... mp3 players are two a fscking penny nowadays... they'll be giving them away with the cornflakes next, just like calculators... if you want to do anything else with an iPod, you've got to hack them... all iPods have now over the other MP3 players, is a perceived image of coolness... but that's gone now as everybody and his dog has got one...

well whoever makes them... I want one... I was going to get an Ipod for Xmas and stick Linux on it, but this beastie is far more usefull and cooler than an iPod... iPods.. every Tom, Dick and Harry's got one... far too common...

It would cost Apple nothing at all to build it in, and it would add at least twice as much value as the gross sales of that gadget. It might be that providing Ogg support, besides, would add relatively little measurable market value to the product. However, it is certain that it would cost them nothing -- either in direct per-unit cost, or even in such intangibles as interface complexity.

How many people are working on alternative firmware, or downloading it? Thousands, certainly. Most of them wouldn't bother if the features they wanted were already there. For each person who downloads such an image, many more might, but for fear, or difficulty, or just not knowing it's there. For each one of them -- who bought despite missing one or more features -- how many didn't buy because of them? Certainly many more.

When a company prefers excuses for leaving out features over quietly adding them, that tells us a lot about the company's attitude toward potential customers. When its existing customers deride, in crudely insulting terms, anybody who asks about missing features or missing information, that tells us volumes more about them. Are they people I would want to seem to be associated with? It's nice enough hardware, but a distinctly toxic milieu.

It is a fact that there's no way to tell from the Apple web site what's up with the dock connector. It is a fact that there's no direct way to tell from their web site whether the dock is needed to connect, or even how heavy the dock is. (There's no reason to think that a Google search would tell anything about a completely new product; the nano dock isn't the same as the mini's.) The most direct interpretation of what little it does say is misleading. I suppose it could be true that new iPods are only meant for people who already bought the old one, or who are inclined to sit down, shut up, and take what they get and like it, but I didn't find either spelled out on the site.

It's nice hardware at a not unreasonable price, and we have proof that it can be programmed to do useful things. If I had no kids, I might put in the effort to help out, myself. As it is, I have to wait and see.

(My experience is that anything not distinctly fawning toward Apple gets moderated to oblivion. I wonder if we will be permitted to discuss this topic.)

Another great post sir! Keep em coming.

I agree with you that using the full screen is more important then stylus support! I said "stylus/etc" but by leaving the other features out I was just trying to not be redundant rather then rate their importance.

You're right though about them probably not messing with it... being compatible with so many consoles all at once is awesome... heh.. when do we start seeing people putting play-yans in gamecube game boy players and making a Nintendo HTPC? :P

As it is now people will likely be able to use existing podcatchers and vidcatching clients with the play-yan and just sync to the SD card, so wifi syncing of podcasts/etc isn't really neccesary, but would be cool.

HOWEVER I would LOVE my iPod to wirelessly sync and if Nintendo were to do this with the Play-Yan I think we'd see Apple push that feature through pretty quickly given the large GBA install base and that with the Play-Yan Nintendo is effectively competing with Apple.

Now just to confuse things further I think I'll link to the GameBoy emulator for iPod!

Actually, the great big reason that Apple doesn't support Ogg Vorbis is because Ogg decoding relies heavily on floating point calculations. The iPod doesn't have a floating point unit and isn't capable of decoding Ogg. Recently, a integer-only player called Tremor was developed, but it only can play on an iPod at 80% real time.

Although i haven't read the article...

i understand it IBM is using iPod as an external storage device to boot Linux from. That is nothing new.

and as far as booting a linux that actually runs on iPod - been there, done that - i have linux running in mine. http://ipodlinux.org/

man... there already is video playing on the original ipod: http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player I'm masturbating to videos on it right now... it's not bad with the backlight turned on - almost seems like there is color; I could use computer, but this is just so damn cool

The folks at http://ipodlinux.org/ have already hacked the iPod into playing a special type of .avi file. AND, Apple is already (!) selling music videos through iTunes, and has been for a few months, for those of you who haven't seen it already.

And I suppose you can run Linux on a mouse?

You say "embedded controller", the documentation calls it "System-on-a-chip". So what? You think Intel wouldn't like to provide the processors for all those iPods? Combine that with increasing Mac sales, Apple should get some decent discounts.

Mind you, I'm no apologist for switching to Intel. I think Intel is just as capable as IBM of wandering off their roadmap or running out of gas halfway there (see: Itanium), and I find it ironic that Apple switches to x86 just as all the consoles seem to be switching to PPC. It will be very interesting to see how IBM chips compare to Intel chips over the next 5 years (in performance, power consumption and cost). I wouldn't put it past Apple to use both architectures for several more years, and even switch back solely to PPC if IBM comes through (or Intel doesn't), but I wouldn't bet on it.

I'm most concerned about Apple taking a step backwards from 64-bit, and moving to a clunky architecture, but that's because I'm interested in some things that benefit greatly from 64-bit processing and some machine-code generation. I regret the apparent shift away from Open Firmware, and a real shift backwards to the hoary old DOS partition format, but I'm truly thankful that they didn't switch to Itanium.

OGG can play on an ipod. actually, i've played ogg on MY 40gb ipod photo. Using code from the linux on ipod project i successfully booted into linux, and played back several normally encoded ogg files I copied to my ipod. they played effortlessly.

don't spread misinformation with such conviction, please.

Note that iPodLinux isn't officially supported on 4G (inc'l photos and minis). However, it IS possible (relatively simple, actually) to install and use. Milage will vary, but it's working for me.

I used the http://www.ipodlinux.org/4G_Installer guide as a basis, and simply replaced the included kernel with the latest daily build - http://www.ipodlinux.org/builds/ before doing the installs. I also used a "super-alpha" version of Podzilla which supports OGG: http://booc.coob.org/podzilla-ogg. The guide emphatically recommends that you backup your iPod first -- I would heartily agree.

The interface is still pretty basic (you use the filebrowser to point to the OGG you want to play and then select it), but it works...

Note that iPodLinux isn't officially supported on 4G (inc'l photos and minis). However, it IS possible (relatively simple, actually) to install and use. Milage will vary, but it's working for me.

I used the http://www.ipodlinux.org/4G_Installer guide as a basis, and simply replaced the included kernel with the latest daily build - http://www.ipodlinux.org/builds/ before doing the installs. I also used a "super-alpha" version of Podzilla which supports OGG: http://booc.coob.org/podzilla-ogg. The guide emphatically recommends that you backup your iPod first -- I would heartily agree.

The interface is still pretty basic (you use the filebrowser to point to the OGG you want to play and then select it), but it works...

Do your research, please.

http://www.ipodlinux.org/FAQ#Is_there_an_OGG_playe r.3F
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

Yes it does:

http://www.ipodlinux.org/blog/index.php?p=18

Well, let's see... it's called the iMac, what?... oh that's right, the iMac G5!
</sarcasm>

Oh! are you talking about the iPod? Check out this

Don't worry, they're already working on it...

http://www.ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16 3

From the iPodLinux FAQ...

"Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster...

Basically, yeah, the thought has occurred to people before. As they say, "Yes, but it's just silly."

Rockbox is a couple of years further along than ipodlinux, and the iRiver port from the Archos is proceeding nicely. I think the two projects have a friendly rivalry.