Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Battery life - a suggestion

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Rincewind:
the biggest issue is disc power down. This can increase battery life by a few hours. The other settings (apart from dircache) don't have much effect in my experience.

Also, using your DAP on a Hifi-system increases battery life because the player doesn't have to provide current to drive the headphones.

Another small thing is the pre-buffer option. Decreasing the prebuffer has the effect that the disc has to spin up less.

In short: everything that makes the disc spin up less is good. The disc and the codec are the main parts that consume power. Tweaking anything else is not very important.

If you have an iriver and put the firmware in flash, the dircache can hibernate, so then dircache shouldn't have a negative effect on battery at all.

riksweeney:
If you have an iriver and put the firmware in flash, the dircache can hibernate, so then dircache shouldn't have a negative effect on battery at all.

How do I do that?

Rincewind:
If you are confident in your skills to follow instructions exactly, go here:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverFlashing

I don't want to scare you, it is rather easy, but there are a few things you have to care about, so read everything on this page!

With flashing, the boot time is decreased dramatically and you don't see text messages from the bootloader at startup, it starts at the rockbox logo.

baobab68:
My ramblings on battery life as it relates to disk spinups and dircache...

The firmware flashing feature is only for iRiver H1xx's at the moment, am I correct?

Rincewind, I too am curious what you mean about it being able to hibernate!

Also Llorean, out of genuine interest, does Directory Cache use more power because it takes a little while to build/check each time you boot up (I can live with that if it's once per listening session), or does it use more power because it has to maintain the Cache in RAM and uses processor cycles to manage it?

In terms of the battery life consideration, I have also noticed that with longer playlists, when I press the REC button once to display playlist contents, RB will spin up the disk. For shorter playlists, it doesn't. I guess this is a function of how much of the playlist can be fit into RAM?

(I see Rincewind has replied in the meantime to the flash question, I'll read that page)

nls:
Dircache might lessen battery time because it uses ram that otherwise would have been used for buffering songs so the disk must spin up more often. But as Llorean said it depends on your listening habits. In other words, if you navigate the file browser a lot it might help battery time and if you listen without much navigation it might lessen battery time a bit, it also depends on the number of files how much ram is needed.

I don't know about your playlist question, it sounds to me like you are using an unofficial build wich I am not familiar with.

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