Rockbox "Zen Edition"?

[joekm]

Still playing with rockbox, tried un-installing then using the graphical utility to install the "minimalist" version thinking it would not have all the plugins, games, etc.  Turns out that wasn't the case.

Here's the thing, while a lot of people probably really like all the games and other bells and whistles (and getting things like Doom and Gnuchess running on a MP3 player is pretty impressive), I think there will also be a lot of people who would rather have the extra memory available then all the add-ons.

So, how about a rockbox "Zen Edition" that is just about the multimedia (audio and video), maybe just the time display as well since it seems to be part of the base interface?

Still theme-able, still font-able, just not all the extra bells and whistles.

[gevaerts]

The plugins only take a bit of space on disk (or flash). Do you really care about 3mb?

[joekm]

The plugins only take a bit of space on disk (or flash). Do you really care about 3mb?

Yes, I think there might be interest in a minimalist or an audio-video specific version, particularly considering how Rockbox adds functionality superior to the OEM software (at least for my Sansa).  I'm quite impressed with what you've accomplished with this.


But I'm happy to leave that to the general opinion of the forum

[AlexP]

I guess if you completely removed the plugins (which as gevaerts says take up a couple of MB on the disk) then you could also kill the plugin buffer and reclaim a bit of RAM?

[Llorean]

I think it may still be used for a few core functions (playlist viewer?) and some plugins are necessary to set up things like random folder advance. You might be able to reduce it somewhat, but that's all. And on the majority of modern players (anything flash based) there's no practical reason to even want to reduce it.

[AlexP]

Oh, I agree - I was just struggling to justify his request - 3 MB of disk space is neither here nor there, but perhaps the RAM on a hard disk target is a slightly better justification.

[Llorean]

Yeah, I was more or less pointing out though that it's basically "all or nothing." You either drop all the add-ons (including the ones that improve the music playback experience and functionality) or there's no sense in dropping any of them except for HD space.

And frankly, if you're down to an empty player, you may experience other problems using Rockbox anyway (like when it attempt to write the NVRam file and config file on shutdown, etc).

[reign16]

what do you mean of rockbox?



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[LambdaCalculus]

what do you mean of rockbox?

We shall reflect on the meaning of this question. This is indeed a very "zen" question.