Best platform for Rockbox?

[Roadster]

I'd like to know this as well. I've had an iRiver H320 for over two years, and the battery is slowly dying, so it'll need replacing soon. As a Rockbox player it was pretty much perfect (for me), apart from the bulky size.

I was thinking of going for a 5.5 iPod, but from what I've read the battery life is poor when running Rockbox. Any other alternatives?

[Multiplex]

I'd like to know this as well. I've had an iRiver H320 for over two years, and the battery is slowly dying, so it'll need replacing soon.

You could just replace the battery... I've not done the battery in mine yet but I have done the HDD and both the HDD and Battery in an H120 - honestly not that difficult - there are good instructions over on mistic river.

Of course if you just want an excuse to buy a new toy, that's a different matter !

[Chronon]

As long as you don't care about recording the Gigabeat F series are quite nice units with decent battery life.

[scharkalvin]

I've been looking at HW that might be used to build my own mp3 player.
(any hw geeks out there?).  The Atmel AVR32 cpu might have enough horsepower, and it does run Linux.  The NGW100 is a low cost development platform ($89 kit at Digikey) and has 32mb of dram and 8mg flash on board.  The cpu has interfaces for LCD, USB (high speed), 2x 10/100 ethernet, audio DAC (16bit stereo at 50k s/s sampling rate), interfaces with various external flash cards etc...

I've found examples of LCD interfaced with this kit, and mp3 playback (linux mplayer) so it looks encouraging.  This is supposed to be a low power (75ma) cpu.

Thoughts??

[cpchan]

mplayer can play flv, so I assume mencoder can convert those too.

Yes. mencoder can transcode them flawlessly.

Charles

[Serenity]

I'd like to add another vote for the iRiver H340 (unless video is an absolute must).  I have one that I got for a song because of a bad battery, and it took me 15 minutes to install a new one.  Totally worth it.  I love the recording features, the multiple inputs, the standard mini-B USB plug...if only it had more storage, cos I have a TON of music.

I did pick up an 80-gig iPod for the storage, and I love it, but Rockbox is still a little new and the battery life isn't quite up there yet.  The iPod's very usable, though, and responds a little quicker than the iRiver through menus, etc.  Of course, no recording, no FM radio, blah blah blah.