Access music from external Firewire Drive

[ninjaniki]

Since firewire is a peer to peer protocol, will it be possible for a Rockboxed Firewire iPod to access and play music from an external HFS or FAT formatted drive? Power for the external drive would be provided externally if needed.

[torne]

The hardware is capable of doing it, but Rockbox does not support firewire at all. Someone would have to implement *any* firewire support before we were able to do this

[ninjaniki]

Thanks for the reply. Are there any plans to incorporate any sort of firewire support into Rockbox? My guess would be, not - since firewire iPod models are probably a very small minority in the iPod population by now. However, one can always hope. I read somewhere that iPodlinux had some firewire support. Any chance some of that could be incorporated? Sorry for the newbie questions. I've been trying to figure out a way to play my nearly 600GB flac collection, stored on a portable HDD, while on the move. I recently realized that my 2G iPod is still in pristine condition, and with Rockbox I have been able to happily listen to my flac files. I'm quite aware that flac is overkill for portable listening, but transcoding at this stage and then maintaining two growing libraries in sync will be a huge pain. In any case even after transcoding to a decent bitrate mp3, the size of the library will be larger than what most current DAPs/PMPs support. Any suggestions?

[nls]

There are no plans for it, no. You could upgrade the harddrive in the ipod to a larger capacity, so you could fit a larger part of your library, not a complete solution but the best i can think of.

[dreamlayers]

You could connect a 3.5" IDE drive to the iPod.  Someone already did this.  Perhaps you could instead connect a 2.5" SATA drive via an IDE to SATA converter (because the biggest 2.5" IDE drive is 320GB).  The iPod wouldn't be able to power these drives, and it might be difficult to make the result look good.

[ninjaniki]

Thanks for all your suggestions guys. I have considered attaching external SATA or PATA drives in the manner you have suggested. I just wanted to check if there was a more elegant software / firewire based solution before I went that path. I actually have 2 2nd generation firewire iPods, that are lying quite unused, so don't mind opening one of them up.