Rockbox VS Apple FW Battery Life

[radink]

Hey all,

Has anyone done a comparison on the battery life with the ipods using Rockbox compared to the Apple FW? I have the 4G greyscale, and using rockbox, the battery seems not to last as long, so I'm just curious.

[Llorean]

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodRuntime

[radink]

Wow, so according to apple it should last about 12 hours (which is not accurate). That would mean I get 1/2 the battery life using rockbox. Just out of curiosity, why is that? I also saw settings for the battery, should I not touch those settings?

[Llorean]

It's because Rockbox is *far* from being fully optimized on the iPod yet. As well there's a lot of unknown stuff relating to hardware which means certain chips could be using more power than necessary because we aren't disabling them when not in use, or initializing them properly (a recent example of something like that happening was the USB on the Go hardware on the H300, which when properly handled nearly doubled battery time).

[radink]

Cool thanks Llorean. It still out weighs having to use iTunes.

[Llorean]

On other players Rockbox has eventually been able to get better battery life than the original firmware. This may take a while with the iPods, but given time and work it could happen.

[radink]

That brings up another question. Any please understand im not complaining, just asking. I wanted to know why is it that you guys have stabilized other players  over the ipods when the ipod is the dominate player in the market? Is it harder to do, or is there another reason?

[dan_a]

It's harder to do, and the ports for the other players were done before the iPod, so the work got finished earlier.

[Llorean]

Several reasons:

1) While the iPods sell the most, in terms of hardware many other players offer better functions, and most of the people working on Rockbox buy players by what they *do*, not by how many they've sold, and Rockbox gets worked on by people who own a player that they like and want to improve.

2) Rockbox only came to iPod recently compared to several other players.

3) Official Datasheets are not available for a lot of the hardware, where other players in some cases had some making work easier.

Just because a player is popular doesn't provide any real incentive to come to it. Rockbox isn't being sold for money, and the people who work on it do it because they want to. This usually means working on it for players *they* want to use, and in many cases that's not been the iPod.

[radink]

Cool, thanks for the info.

[scorche]

There have been some optimizations lately that have taken the runtime up a bit as well, so you might not be as bad off as listed in there.

[alecjw]

Does rockbox shut off the HDD when it's not in use? I've noticed that with the iPod firmware, the hard drive whirrs for about 2 seconds, presumably filling up the less power-hundgry ram, then kills the hard drive. Does rockbox do this?

I would check myself, but I havn't got rockbox working yet.

[Llorean]

Yes it does. There's even an option as to whether or not you want to keep providing idle power to the HD, or power it down completely when not in use.

[L]

Is there a point to keep providing idle power to it then? I'm just curious

[bascule]

Faster spin-up time is the only benefit, but if you've got Directory Cache and Tag Cache in memory, you are probably better served by switching the drive power completely off.