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After 3 Years, Rockbox 3.0 Released
DarkkOne writes "Rockbox version 3.0 is out. Three years in development, it marks the introduction of many new players since the 2.5 release and offers software-based playback allowing audio of nearly any commonly (or uncommonly) used format on a list of MP3 players by Apple, iRiver, Cowon, Archos, Toshiba and Sandisk. Beyond this it is FLOSS, under the GPL v2 license (or later), and includes a variety of plugins such as games and simple apps. 3.0 is the first official release for any players not made by Archos and more or less marks the beginning of a much more regular release cycle for the software."
The chief advantage over the iPod OS is that it plays flac and ogg vorbis files, as well as many formats of video if your player's CPU is fast enough.
It also lets you move media to and from your your player by simple drag-and-drop operations; you don't need a special app to load it, build the iTunes database, etc.
Disadvantages? Well, the interface is different. I like it, you might not.
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Pros:
Lots of games (a few are decent even)
Music can be copies off with no effort (just files on a disk)
Flac, and Ogg support
Really nice playlist builder on the device
Cons:
Harder to get a playlist from a computer
The database option is nice, but not as seamless as from iTunes (you can browse buy database or by filesystem)
I really like it, I think the whats playing screen looks great, and I like being ably to through a quick playlist together. If a friend has a song I want, I just copy it over, and listen on the way home. I want music on my computer at work, plug it in and copy to the computer.
iTunes may be great within the iTunes system, but in a social world at large I find Rockbox to be more useful.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
There seem to be big battery life improvements, especially with the 5g ipods.
I've used it on my iRiver h120 player and it is 100x better than the stock firmware for that player. It boots faster, clean file browser, better power management and it can play OGG and FLAC and all that good stuff. Its awesome.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I just checked too, because I have been waiting for someone to crack that hardware and bring out a video player for my little iPod nano. And the short answer: no. Come ON, Apple. Bring out an update to allow us all to play video on our old hardware. /stupid thing to say. They want me to buy another one.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Any word on compatibility with Creative's players? They're a pretty big part of the PMP market and the next company that comes to mind (for me) after Apple.
It appears to be in the very early stages.
I'd love to see a Rockbox port to the flash based ZENs if only to fix the pathetic functionality of the SD slot... How Creative got away with calling it memory "expansion" or "upgrades" is beyond me.
That reallly needs the firmware... the Zune.
Great Hardware? This does not surprise me at all.
After all, the Zunes are, hardware-wise, designed and manufactured by Toshiba (afaik).
Then again, the real Toshibas are known for their excellent audio quality *and* (some of them at least) are being supported by Rockbox.
So why bother with an under-cover Toshiba, hampered by mediocre third party firmware? ;-)
Get a real one (Gigabeat).
I've been using rockbox on that hardware for a year or two and I've been very happy with it. I actually bought this player only for the purpose of using Rockbox (a step of faith considering I'd never used it previously).
Using the original firmware to copy files is fairly transparent. If the device is on and you plug in the USB port, it powers on and automatically boots to the original firmware. Then when you unplug it the system automatically reboots to the Rockbox firmware. I'm sure they'll set it to just boot to Rockbox once it supports USB syncing.
About the only time it would seem to be inconvenient is if you wanted to listen to music while having it plugged into USB. That never happens for me - I can just play music on my PC if I want to.
Be careful to make sure that any of the sansa's you pick up this way are version 1.0 of the hardware. There is a v2.0 which replaced all of the internals which (currently) won't run Rockbox. www.froobi.com (if you're in the USA/Canada) certify their sansas as "Rockbox ready" so you *know* you're getting the right hardware version.
Gentlemen, start your penguins
While you can use Rockbox on the 5G ipods to playback video using the MpegPlayer plugin (not based on mplayer as other comments suggest) and MPEG 1/2 format movies, we actually recommend still using the Original Firmware (OF) for movie playback (which is fine, since Rockbox allows you to dual boot back to the old OF whenever you like). This is because the 5Gs include a hardware video processor which no public specs are available for, and which Rockbox is therefore unable to use. It far outperforms our software video rendering sadly.
Gentlemen, start your penguins