Rockbox Technical Forums

Support and General Use => Audio Playback, Database and Playlists => Topic started by: nuraman00 on March 02, 2019, 01:32:16 PM

Title: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: nuraman00 on March 02, 2019, 01:32:16 PM
I have a dual boot iPod Video that can booth both the Apple firmware, and Rock Box.

The Apple Firmware can find my media when I sync with iTunes.  iTunes copies / syncs the media on my iPod.

How can I get Rock Box to find the same media, without creating duplicate copy of the media?

Do I have to export the iTunes playlist to .m3u?  That only creates a new playlist file, right?  It doesn't copy the media again, correct?

If I have to convert the playlist, which of these playlist tools under "Playlist Tools" is recommended?

https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/UsefulTools#Playlist_Tools

Also, if I have to generate a .m3u file for Rock Box, where do I put this playlist file on the iPod so Rock Box can find it?

And do I have to update this .m3u file on Rock Box, everytime the playlist in iTunes is updated?  So after updating the playlist in iTunes, do I then have to generate a new .m3u playlist, and copy it onto the iPod again somewhere so Rock Box can find it?
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: saratoga on March 02, 2019, 03:40:04 PM
You can use the database or manually make m3u files. File browser won't work well since the apple firmware gives files random names.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: nuraman00 on March 03, 2019, 07:26:12 PM
You can use the database or manually make m3u files. File browser won't work well since the apple firmware gives files random names.

Thanks.  The database worked pretty well.  I went to initialize database, and it found all of the media that was on the iPod and that was synced through iTunes.

The only issue I saw was that when I tried to play video files, it didn't play the video on Rock Box, only music.  Why is that?

If I went to the apple firmware, I could play those same video files.

I also have Rock Box on a Sansa Fuze+, so I know it can play video files.

Other than that, this seems to have solved the issue of being able to access media through both Apple firmware, and Rock Box, and only having one copy of the media.

It seems like all I will have to do is update the database, and it will find the updated media that was synced through iTunes.

Hopefully someone can help figure out why Rock Box didn't play those video files, and make that work.

Then this setup of having both firmwares will be great.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: saratoga on March 03, 2019, 07:50:37 PM
The only issue I saw was that when I tried to play video files, it didn't play the video on Rock Box, only music.  Why is that?

The two firmwares do not support the same formats.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: nuraman00 on March 03, 2019, 07:52:53 PM
4 of the music videos are .mp4 files.  Rock Box supports that, right?

I've played these same .mp4 files on my Sansa Fuze+.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: saratoga on March 03, 2019, 08:50:58 PM
4 of the music videos are .mp4 files.  Rock Box supports that, right?

No.  By the way, there is a list of supported formats and instructions in the manual if you need to convert.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: nuraman00 on March 04, 2019, 04:00:02 AM
4 of the music videos are .mp4 files.  Rock Box supports that, right?

No.  By the way, there is a list of supported formats and instructions in the manual if you need to convert.

I looked at this manual, and it says .mp4 is a permissible file extension, on page 193:

https://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-ipodvideo.pdf.

Is there another page with supported formats?
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: Frankenpod on March 04, 2019, 04:17:43 AM
Isn't mp4 a 'container' rather than a format, though?

I confess, I've long been confused by that distinction myself.  I keep meaning to read up on it but it's never seemed worth the effort to do so!

I don't think Rockbox is very good at video, but personally it seems a waste of battery-life to play videos on my player so I don't care.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: saratoga on March 04, 2019, 08:21:05 AM
4 of the music videos are .mp4 files.  Rock Box supports that, right?

No.  By the way, there is a list of supported formats and instructions in the manual if you need to convert.

I looked at this manual, and it says .mp4 is a permissible file extension, on page 193:

Did you actually read that page?

Is there another page with supported formats?

See the "File formats" chapter.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: chris_s on March 04, 2019, 09:47:18 AM
Isn't mp4 a 'container' rather than a format, though?
Yeah. As long as the music video contains an AAC/ALAC audio data stream, you should be able to listen to it. Just without the video. Of course, that doesn't appear to be be what the OP wants. I've found it very useful in the past though, since I, like you, don't care for video on my ipod but like to play the audio portion of music videos on my iPod 4G, which seems to work well enough.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: nuraman00 on March 08, 2019, 03:35:26 AM
4 of the music videos are .mp4 files.  Rock Box supports that, right?

No.  By the way, there is a list of supported formats and instructions in the manual if you need to convert.

I looked at this manual, and it says .mp4 is a permissible file extension, on page 193:

Did you actually read that page?

Is there another page with supported formats?

See the "File formats" chapter.

I see what my confusion was now.  I had thought that on my Sansa Fuze+ with Rock Box, I had mp4 video files, so I thought the iPod Video with Rock Box should have also played them. 

And then when I looked at that page 193 in the manual, it seemed to suggest that it should have worked.  But now I see that page in the manual that mentioned the mp4 file format, didn't say that mp4 was permissible for video, it just said it was permissible.

And when I checked my Sansa Fuze+, I saw that I had actually converted the videos to .mpg, which is the supported format.  So now I agree, that I will have to do this for the iPod Video too.

I also agree that video takes up a lot of battery life.  But, I only have 5, and watch them once in a while.  Not very frequently.

Another question:

I'm someone that has always listened to albums in their entirety.  I just find the album, play the first track, and then don't skip songs.

But, there's a certain box set that I have, that I now want to pick and chose a little bit, so I can listen to the tracks in a certain order.

So I'll want to create a playlist that isn't simply an album in order.

And also, have it be accessible to both the Apple firmware, and Rock Box, without duplicating the media.

Will this process work?

1)  Create playlist in iTunes.
2)  Sync so it's available to the Apple firmware.  This will copy the media too if necessary.
3)  Use one of the export tools to export that playlist to .m3u format.

I had tried the graphical version of iTunes Export, but I kept getting an error when using the Adobe AIR installer, that said the installer file was a damaged file.

So then I used the command line JAR version, and saw that it created the .m3u playlist.  I see there's various command line options I can give it to help restrict the playlists that it creates.

But I think I want to try a tool with an graphical interface first, so I'll try one of the other tools soon, to create the .m3u playlist.

4)  Put the .m3u playlist in the Rock Box -->Playlist folder on the iPod.



Thanks again for everyone's helpful comments.
Title: Re: How to get Rock Box to find media on an iPod Video.
Post by: Frankenpod on March 08, 2019, 03:50:26 AM
I don't think that will work, because of the way iTunes completely mangles the directory structure and file names when it syncs.  The exported playlist (depending how exporting works in iTunes) will refer to the file structure of your iTunes library on the PC, but that on the ipod will be completely different once iTunes does it's tiresome obfuscation work.  You'd have to somehow convert, to m3u, the playlist as it is on the iPod rather than how it starts out in iTunes.  Not sure if that can be done.

(I'm assuming iTunes does this as some idiotic attempt at DRM?  I don't understand why they wrote it that way, seems a pointless complication to me).

With a great deal of effort you could work out how the file names/directories on the ipod relate to the album you started with and then reonstruct the playlist 'by hand'.  (This is why the file name mangling is useless as DRM, if the tags are filled in you can just connect an ipod to a PC/Mac/linux box and look at the files and sort them by album name, if you really want to copy music back from the ipod - so I don't get why Apple bothered doing it this way).