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Hacking the iPod Firmware
skreuzer writes "Earlier in the week, someone figured out how to get all the fonts and graphics off the iPod's firmware. Today, Engadget has an article that details on how to mod your own iPod's firmware and display just about any graphic for icons such as power, battery, status, etc."
the current ipods can't decode ogg. their processors can't handle that kind of decoding, so even if you could mod it, it most likely wouldn't be able to keep up and play properly
According to Page 2 at MacRumors, Apple will add playback of both OGG and FLAC in the iPod and iTunes at MWSF on January 11th.
There is a Howto on making a linux bootable from an iPod.
That way, you can always reboot any NetBSD machine into linux and access your iPod there. When your done, fall back to NetBSD.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
For thousands of years people have been 'modding' their clothes, houses, faces and bodies to distinguish themselves from the herd around them. Given that, I don't think hardware is a special case. If it forms part of your image then it will be changed, adapted or co-opted to help illustrate the personbrand you are. That's just the way human nature works, so no, the plastic surgery generation is irrelevant it's the an expression of desire for status, individuality and the illusion of differentiation.
Like most other things, it's just "same old, same old".
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Chris Nowak has figured out how to do something the smart people at engadget couldn't do, hack the iPod images without loosing all your songs or data. Check out Chris's article "iPod Hacking". Props to Nowak for coming up with this.
. ht ml
http://cnowak.blogspot.com/2004/12/ipod-hacking
Yes. The easiest way at the moment is iPod Linux.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The firmware is in the first partition of the disk drive, so updating the firmware (from Linux) is just:
dd if=new-ipod-firmware of=/dev/sda1
(where sda1 is replaced with the actual device on your system). The iPod expands the firmware and then reboots to use it.
The only tricky part is that Apple doesn't distribute the firmware file outside of their updater application, so you have to download the Windows updater and then use a resource hacking tool to extract it.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Actually, the non-Photo iPod (all models) use a 2-bit (4 color) greyscale screen. This is actually almost exactly like the screen built into Nintendo's Game Boy unit (untill GBC.). The best way I have found to convert full color images to be used with older iPod is to crack open PS> Open the image you would like to import to your iPod. Scale the image to the desired size first. Then, go to Image>Mode>Greyscale and click OK when it asks you to remove all color info. Then go to Image>Mode>RGB color. This is to get the pic back into a 32-bit pallete. You MUST DO THIS, otherwise your image won't dither correctly and it will look like crap. Finally, click Image>Mode>Indexed color... This will open a dialog. For pallete pick Adaptive (perceptual). In the number of colors dialog, type 4. For forced colors, pick Black and White (iPod screen is Black (full on), White (full off), and 33% on, 66% on for 4 'shades'). Enable Dithering using the dither method (NOT pattern) and mess with the percentage of dithering till the image is like you want it. Export to your iPod and enjoy.
It's possible to change the text, menus, etc. also. Now you can change the "Do not disconnect." text along with the graphic. Warning: this is nowhere near as user friendly as the ipodwizard program, but it worked for me using a 4th gen. iPod on linux. Just download the firmware with dd from the /dev/sdx1 partition, open up a hex editor and replace whatever text you want. There's a checksum located at 0x421C that needs to be updated. There's a checksum2.c program that can calculate and write a firmware's checksum. I'm not going to post a link to it due to the author's wish to avoid a slashdotting but a bit of searching should find it. I found that this program didn't calculate the checksum correctly but always returned a value 16418 too high so I just modified it to subtract this constant. This is almost certainly specific for my particular ipod verson. After the firmware is written back with dd, the text modifications show up. All the text that can be reasonably edited is located together in one block in the file. I changed what shows up under Settings->About->Format from "Windows" to "Linux" so now I have a Linux iPod.
Try turning it off and flashing with the phone off, but charging - if I remember properly, this puts it into a USB-receptive mode.
Then again, you might have nuked that too, I don't know.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Well, if you're a Mac users, there's already OGG support for Quicktime and iTunes.
Quicktime OGG component
It's actually been out for quite a while... the only problem is that the OGG support doesn't automagically carry over to the iPod.
No need for the resource hacking tool.
;)
When you build the bootloader it needs a copy of the firmware you want to use, and the kernel you want to boot Linux with. To get the firmware, you can just download the newest updater from Apple's website, use that other OS to update the iPod with it, and then just do a
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=./apple-firmware.
Then, the bootloader package has a tool to truncate that partition image (32MB iirc) to the actual bootloader. Done, and no windows trickery required, apart from the necessary iPod Updater run.
Actually now I think about it, the tool in the bootloader package is probably doing a similar job on the partition image as the resource hacker is in Windows. Ah well, always nicer to do it with dd