better battery life: iPod

[tbluhp]

can we see better battery life one non daily build comes out this november?

[Llorean]

I don't understand what you're asking, nor why it's in this section.

[tbluhp]

I don't understand what you're asking, nor why it's in this section.

I was asking if we will be able to see any battery improvements when the official rockbox build of ipod comes out?

[Llorean]

So, what does that have to do with "unsupported" builds?

And there is very unlikely to be an official build in November for iPods. It's not come far enough yet. As you may have noticed, battery life is poor still. Fixing it is not something that can easily be scheduled, and that is likely going to be a requirement before a release for iPod can happen.

[Febs]

You will see better battery life before an official version is released.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be an official version released, as the battery life issue is a release-critical issue.

[audiodude]

Is anyone working on the battery life task yet? I'm just curious, for I've been watching the CVS activity on the mainpage for almost 2 months (until now) without seeing anything that might be related to iPod battery life.

[Llorean]

This just means you don't know how to recognize which ones will improve battery life. For example, the upgrades to the AAC codec make a difference for battery life for a lot of users as the CPU can actually unboost during playback now.

Improving battery life is not a straightforward thing, and one of the keys to fixing it is most likely going to be making sure things are properly initialized which isn't necessarily something you'll see anything about in CVS until someone's solved it and can make the proper changes (the changes themselves probably being relatively small), but it also isn't something you can really measure progress on.

[mnhnhyouh]

Improving battery life is not a straightforward thing, .................... but it also isn't something you can really measure progress on.

I would have thought that measuring changes in battery life is something you can easily measure... there is even a plugin to do so. Or did I miss something?

h

[Llorean]

I meant in the context of "people are working on it."

Say 'Bob' is trying to figure out how to correctly initialize component A. Odds are that you won't see *any* affects of his work until he finds the correct initialization. And then it'll be done, and committed. So, from a users perspective, six months of nothing, then suddenly one day battery life gets 20% better, or whatever. From Bob's perspective he's tried many many things, but none of them work. There's nothing to measure, because in reality all he's got is a pile of things he knows doesn't work, so he's not really any closer to it. That's what I mean by "not really something you can measure progress on." It's either done, or it's not, in the case of many of the things that need to be fixed.

Of course for optimizations and other things, where it's a gradual improvement, sure you can measure progress with battery benchmarks, but the main things that fix battery life are likely to be the hardware things now, or so many of us are guessing. And those are particularly hard to do anything about, nearly impossible to measure progress on, and will be done when people discover answers.

[saratoga]

Regarding battery life, has there been progress on enabling the second core in Rockbox recently?  I remember some work going on over the summer, but since then I've had to stop following IRC so I lost track of the effort.

[Llorean]

It's come to a standstill at the moment. There was some work in progress code, but for some reason it couldn't be gotten to work on the newer iPods.