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."

Comments

adding in OGG?

[the_2nd_coming]

when will some one hack it to play Ogg?

Re:adding in OGG?

[physicsnerd]

There's a page2 rumor over at Macrumors.com that ogg support will be added into Quicktime and iTunes at MWSF. With ogg support in both Quicktime and iTunes it's likely that the iPod software will be updated to play ogg files.

Re:adding in OGG?

[Mattintosh]

Why should he have to re-rip his music? Why can't players just support everything currently feasible (OGG used to require floating point stuff, so it wasn't feasible at first) and have support for updates that add more formats as they become popular?

As long as it's technically possible, every player should support every format. AIFF, WAV, AU, MP2, MP3, OGG, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, AAC (M4A, M4P), WMA... these should all be supported. Heck, iTunes (back when it was still SoundJam) supported 30+ formats and had a relatively easy plugin system to add more. There's just no excuse not to support everything, unless you're after a slice of the vendor lock-in pie.

Disclaimer: I am an Apple almost-fanboy and have most of my music in AAC format. I personally couldn't care less about .ogg support on the iPod.

Re:adding in OGG?

[dgatwood]

I haven't seen much stuff encoded with Apple's encoder, so it's hard to say. If memory serves, I think the labels do their own encoding. Somebody once told me that a lot of it was encoded with the Fraunhofer AAC encoder rather than Apple's. If you rip something from CD and it sounds different from the iTMS version, that's probably why.

There's no question in my mind that Ogg sounds better than the Fraunhofer AAC encoder. That encoder sounds awful whenever there's near-continuous cymbal, with all sorts of flanging in the highs.

Of course, where Ogg excels (and AAC falls flat) is on thinner music such as string quartets, solo voice and piano, etc. When there isn't much to mask the AAC artifacts, it sounds pretty terrible, IMHO.

What I'd like to see would be not just Ogg Vorbis support on the iPod, but Ogg Vorbis support in the music store---leave the codec decisions (Fraunhofer AAC, Apple AAC, Fraunhofer MP3, LAME MP3, Ogg Vorbis... in either CBR or VBR form) to the people doing the encoding. Let them choose whatever sounds best at that bitrate. Then wrap it all in an encryption wrapper like they do with AAC. That way, all the music on the music store would sound as good as possible (assuming the person doing the encoding was willing to try various codecs and see which one sounded best).

Just my $0.02.

Re:adding in OGG?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

iTunes allows people to import CDs and encode them to MP3, so AAC is beside the point, in my opinion.

I know MP3 is a patent encumbered format, the plain fact is that there is no realistic way of getting around it for consumer hardware, if it doesn't play MP3, it doesn't sell, so they will for the forseeable future, feature MP3.

I'm not sure how much more efficient OGG is, but unless it is 50% or more efficient for the same sound quality than MP3, I think that efficiency is kind of moot as storage capacity increases every year anyway.

Re:Nothing to see here, please move along...

[tonsofpcs]

Why? It is almost always easier to 'hack' into something using a system it wasn't designed for. On a system that a piece of hardware was designed for, you need to deal with getting around design; on a system it wasn't designed for, you can just get right into it alot easier.

Forget that, just install Linux on the thing.

[Otto]

Okay, so Linux isn't quite all there yet for the iPod, but progress is being made, more or less. You can put Linux on the thing and boot it and run apps and such anyway.

iPodLinux.org

Re:Forget that, just install Linux on the thing.

[Otto]

But what kinda MP3 codec is running in Linux?

You're not making much sense, there. An MP3 decoder is an MP3 decoder. They're all the same. Some are faster or slower, but they all should produce identical output. MP3 encoders can vary, MP3 decoders cannot (short of implementation bugs, of course).

The MP3 decoder for the iPodLinux project isn't wholly finished yet because the kernel has some issues with the dual processors in the iPod. Work on making it faster is therefore progressing rather slowly. It's not yet suitable for public consumption, in other words. But for hacking around and trying stuff out, it's great.

And if you don't want to lose the use of your iPod, the installer can install dual boot. So that you can boot to the Apple firmware by default or boot to the Linux firmware by holding down a button at startup. Or vice-versa. :)

Killer App...

[Chrontius]

Since Apple's not doing it, and iPod firmware is no longer clear as mud, let me suggest something to those l33ter than I: A really compelling feature would be a book reader program that can take large text files with limited HTML -- just the basics like bold, italic, and underline, maybe even blockquote.

With Baen distributing free books in RTF format with many hardbacks, and me getting an iPod for Christmas, this just got a lot more interesting.

If anyone figures this out, I'd be happy to send a couple Baen CDs (copied) as a thank-you.

Of course it might break the HW

[Flexagon]

As far as I can tell, this can't damage the iPod's hardware, can it?

How do you know? In many highly cost-reduced platforms, critical control is moved into software, so that it might be quite easy to break the hardware by breaking the software. Fiddle with the power management (charging) firmware on some mobile devices and you might blow up the batteries or at least create a serious overheating condition. This kind of thing happens often enough to cause recalls and firmware updates even in "official" firmware to easily back up a claim that hacking the software can break the hardware.

The earlier sibling's response is also sufficiently valid on its own: the vendor has no obligation to diagnose your problems if you've changed the (software) platform that provides the basis for their diagnosis capability. You didn't pay for an advanced hardware-only diagnostic service.

read on

[gotr00t]

They're currently working on making it work for the newer generation of iPods. Because they use the newer chipset from PortalPlayer, the memory mappings aren't quite the same (please correct me if someone understands this better).

You can still use your iPod firmware pretty easily. I have Linux installed on my 3G iPod, and it's kinda like a dual-boot.

If you think about it, it's a lot easier to program in C, using documented libs (podzilla) for the iPod, rather than hacking the Apple firmware and trying to add functionality, which will probably break your firmware anyhow.

Realistically...

[allwaysmusic]

Not sure how many people will actually take the time to change the graphics???

Don't get me wrong... the idea of changing the pictures on your iPod and personalizing your iPod is really cool! I just don't know how many will take the time and effort to do it.

Really clever firmware hack by the way. :)

http://allwaysmusic.modblog.com/

Re:Can't be far off.

[WJMoore]

I believe Apple have one already. It what they use to produce the iPod screen captures on their website, such as: http://images.apple.com/ipod/images/musiccalendar_ 20040719.gif.

Re:Cool

[Moofie]

Careful what you wish for.

I know that my 4G has a different screen than yours, but it seems like the response time on my screen is really slow. Sometimes it's difficult to read the song title as it's scrolling. It would be nice if I could turn this off.

However, my #1 most wanted feature would be to decrease the sensitivity of song rating changes. I can't figure out why it doesn't just do one star per quarter-turn or so.