Plans for working on battery life

[gummbah]

What are the plans for working on improving battery life of Rockbox on the Ipod?
As fas as I am concerned that is the last major issue left for the Ipod.

[Llorean]

I'd say the freezing happening on the 4th generation iPods, as well as the endless reboot bug that seems to affect some 5th generation ones, completely preventing some users from using them at all qualifies as more "major" :-P

Optimizations should help battery life quite a bit (and subsequently improve skipping issues people experience while enabling the equalizer and listening to music.)

Other than that, someone will have to identify if there's anywhere specific power draws are happening that are beyond what can be reasonably expected.

[gummbah]

Skipping and freezing did not occur for me for a long time so I assumed that was fixed. Too bad it is not. Regarding battery life I just hope that Rockbox will eventually perform at least similar to the Ipod.

Are there any specific release plans for a 1.0 version of the Ipod?

[goemon4]

just remember the ipod does less things, and displays less colours than rockbox...for instance with a backdrop with alot of colours uses up alot more battery power than a solid colour...but a solid colour still takes up more that the ipods white backdrop.....its kinda like viewing a photo and listening to music at the same time and apple says: (for the video)
30GB: Up to 14 hours of music playback; up to 3 hours of slideshows with music; up to 2 hours of video playback
60GB: Up to 20 hours of music playback; up to 4 hours of slideshows with music; up to 3 hours of video playback

so mabey to consume your battery try to have a plain backdrop....and its pretty self explanitory that games use up alot of battery power to...

[Febs]

Are there any specific release plans for a 1.0 version of the Ipod?

Rockbox v3.1 is targeted for November, and will include a release for iPod platforms.

[Drkepilogue]

just remember the ipod does less things, and displays less colours than rockbox...for instance with a backdrop with alot of colours uses up alot more battery power than a solid colour...but a solid colour still takes up more that the ipods white backdrop.....its kinda like viewing a photo and listening to music at the same time and apple says: (for the video)
30GB: Up to 14 hours of music playback; up to 3 hours of slideshows with music; up to 2 hours of video playback
60GB: Up to 20 hours of music playback; up to 4 hours of slideshows with music; up to 3 hours of video playback

so mabey to consume your battery try to have a plain backdrop....and its pretty self explanitory that games use up alot of battery power to...

sure, it will save some battery life but not by a whole not.  I tested this, and with a back drop, i only got 30min less life. 

[crescentfresh]

If you're on a long car trip, those 30 minutes will be much appreciated, especially when rockbox is already getting 2 or 3 hours less than Apple's firmware (on a 4g color at least).  I had actually suggested an option that would shut your screen down after X amount of time while playing music to help save battery life, but most people didn't seem to think it was a good idea for some reason.

[gummbah]

Are there any specific release plans for a 1.0 version of the Ipod?

Rockbox v3.1 is targeted for November, and will include a release for iPod platforms.

Awesome!

[Drkepilogue]

If you're on a long car trip, those 30 minutes will be much appreciated, especially when rockbox is already getting 2 or 3 hours less than Apple's firmware (on a 4g color at least).  I had actually suggested an option that would shut your screen down after X amount of time while playing music to help save battery life, but most people didn't seem to think it was a good idea for some reason.

I dont think that they dont care, but most of us are just beta tester, with little knowledge of developing plugins and stuff.  We can only test, but it is up to the developers to make the program.  They have other top prioities right now...  i wish they can fix the battery issue ASAP, but since i cant do it, ill wait..

[Llorean]

Well the other thing is that Rockbox is in development.  Battery life is completely non-essential to development. Most testing can be done with the unit plugged in, or only requires it to be on for a short while (at least within current battery life.) So, almost anything else takes priority over battery life, since it's more a "user" thing, and can be focused on when other issues are cleared up.

As well, many many many other things will affect battery life (codec optimizations, possibly how we decide to use the second core, better graphics code, etc) so you can't really focus on it first, but rather fix everything else and then see if it's still a problem.

[crescentfresh]

I completely respect the fact that battery life takes a seat on the back burner while the software itself is fleshed out.  I just brought up the idea here (and it was moved to the general board), and was surprised to see that people seemed to think it was a dumb idea, especially when there are a number of complaints about battery life, especially on a number of the ipod models.

Would shutting the screen down during music play be the best way to optimize battery life???  Absolutely not.  Could it help a bit though???  Certainly.  That's why I was surprised that it was kind of shut down as a suggestion.

[Drkepilogue]

I understand that shutting down the screen will help conserve battery life but i belive the developers are busy with other stuff.  If you know how to do it, i think you should, since it is a good idea.  But if you cant, all you can do is wait for someone to do it.

[Llorean]

While shutting down the screen will help a _little_ bit, it would have to be an option (meaning overall size increase for the rockbox binary, slightly harming the battery life of everyone who DOESN'T use it), as well as the fact that the screen would still have to be calculater, just not sent to the LCD, so it really wouldn't increase the battery life significantly more than simply shutting off the backlight. At least, if my understanding is correct.

So while shutting it off is not a bad idea, you have to consider how many people will use it. Because having it as an option means that it will affect all users in some way, whether enabled or not. Feature bloat is a danger, simply because saying "Well it's small" is fine until the small things add up.

[SilleeString]

While shutting down the screen will help a _little_ bit, it would have to be an option (meaning overall size increase for the rockbox binary, slightly harming the battery life of everyone who DOESN'T use it), as well as the fact that the screen would still have to be calculater, just not sent to the LCD, so it really wouldn't increase the battery life significantly more than simply shutting off the backlight. At least, if my understanding is correct.

So while shutting it off is not a bad idea, you have to consider how many people will use it. Because having it as an option means that it will affect all users in some way, whether enabled or not. Feature bloat is a danger, simply because saying "Well it's small" is fine until the small things add up.

Old philosophical argument.  How many grains of sand do you place together before it makes a pile?  Is one grain a pile?  Is two?  Decidedly not, but eventually it'll be one when nobody notices.

Sorry for that but I had to analogize it lol

[Llorean]

The problem is that when everyone has their own grain of sand to add to the pile that's already there, how do you pick which ones get to go on it? There's already a pile. We know that pile will get bigger. The question is "Is this grain of sand worth making the pile bigger?" Of course, the suggestor will feel it is, but it's definitely a matter to be debated.

I'm not the one who gets to decide whether this one does or doesn't, but in this case the question must be "Who does it benefit? Who does it harm? Which is worth more?"