Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion
..And the best supported hdd player for playback is? (winner: Gigabeat)
jgombos:
I'm looking to get a hard drive model. What I'm after is something that is the best supported for Rockbox. Judging from the wiki, I got the impression that the Archos JBR v2 is the most reliable hardware. It's the /only/ device that is "supported", while everything else is "usable".
The market is terrible for Archos buyers. Even eBay has < 5 listings. But it's not completely extinct. I found a seller who will sell a mint condition JBRv2 for $70.
Ultimately the device will go to someone who doesn't care about feature richness as much a reliability. Reliability is everything. The user gets very stressed when things glitch out - and I don't want to buy her a stressor for Christmas. I would also like some degree of future proofing, so the device will continue to work with future revisions of Rockbox.
Archos doesn't even appear in the buyers guide, perhaps because it's so rare. Should I get the JBRv2, or are there better options?
LambdaCalculus:
You can get an Archos; they're built like little tanks in terms of durability. But you'll be severely limited with an Archos in terms of codec choices. The Archos players are all limited to playing only MP3 and WAV files due to hardware limitations.
For a HDD-based player, search out an iriver H1x0, H3x0, iAUDIO X5, Gigabeat, or iPod. The Buyer's Guide will explain more.
jgombos:
:o Ouch.. I can't be limited to mp3s. Part of the collection is AAC.
I see a lot of posts from users encountering problems in all the forums.. and having to reboot. I'm figuring that means I should get a dual bootable device so the user can revert to the OEM OS if there are issues. Do any non-Archos HDD devices stand out as being more reliable than the rest?
Now that I'm focused on dual booting, are there any dual bootable devices such that both OSs can access the same copy of the music library? I suspect iPods would have a problem with that, considering how factory iPods are unable to play music from the part of the hard drive that contains files that were manually copied.
GodEater:
--- Quote from: jgombos on December 04, 2007, 12:01:57 AM ---I see a lot of posts from users encountering problems in all the forums.. and having to reboot. I'm figuring that means I should get a dual bootable device so the user can revert to the OEM OS if there are issues. Do any non-Archos HDD devices stand out as being more reliable than the rest?
--- End quote ---
I can only speak from personal experience here - but I own three current Rockbox targets which all meet your HD player criteria. They are the iRiver H140, iPod Video 80GB, and the Gigabeat F40. I've found all of them extremely reliable - but of the three, the iRiver is the one I have to reboot least often. Now just to put that into perspective, because I don't want the other two to come off as poor choices - the iPod I've had to reset maybe 6 times this YEAR. The Gigabeat maybe twice. iRiver not at all.
--- Quote ---Now that I'm focused on dual booting, are there any dual bootable devices such that both OSs can access the same copy of the music library? I suspect iPods would have a problem with that, considering how factory iPods are unable to play music from the part of the hard drive that contains files that were manually copied.
--- End quote ---
Yes - but Rockbox is able to play music from ALL portions of the hard drive - so load your music on with iTunes if the Original Firmware is important to you, and then use Rockbox's database facility to access it properly.
pondlife:
Generally, the older the port, the more stable it is.
Also, PortalPlayer-based devices (iPod, iRiver H10, Sansa) have had to be largely reverse-engineered, so aren't quite as stable, and suffer from reduced battery life.
I've got an Iriver H340 (H380 now), and that's very stable indeed.
pondlife
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version