Ipod with rockbox - 4G 20gb, a few concerns and questions

[jonah1980]

Hi i wondered if anyone can help me out. I just bought a 20gb 4G ipod - i've got a little less than a week before the money back guarentee expires as it's a used model.

i paid £100 for it, which i thought was good for 20gb, i've loads of music and £100 was about my limit - but i needed a good mp3 player that would hold loads of tracks.

as i use linux most of my music is in ogg format. i've got about 15gig of my computer in this format, so i really need rockbox as the ipod won't play it without, plus i can't really use itunes anyway due to only using linux...

Basically i need advise as whether i've got the right player for me, if the price seems ok. Also it's hard to know if the ipod is in good condition due to having to use rockbox.

It's crashed loads of times, just locked up - sometimes does it towards beginning of just playing one track, sometimes it can be 30mins down the line in the middle of an album... is this my ipod or rockbox? and how could i really know?

how soon do you think rockbox will improve? hopefully these crashes will dissapear right?

also my battery - now rockbox seems to let you pick the mah for the indicator - but it starts at 620mah or something - am i right in thinking that the 4G ipod is 600mah? so i can't set this for accurate battery indication.

and while on subject of battery, how long should it last on my model - any users have a rough average? as the life span seems quite short - i don't know if my ipod battery is in good condition or not either. so obviously i have concerns about the hardrive and the battery due to having to use rockbox...

if any users can tell me what is average or normal for ipod 4g on rockbox then hopefully you can confirm my ipod is in good working order and it's just rockbox that needs improvement...

also are there any devs that can please help make the ipod port better, it really would make life great if rockbox didn't crash and the battery lasted...

thanks so much for any help, support, advise, or knowledge on the 4G ipod with rockbox...

[mightybrick]

As far as the 4G, I don't really know the state of the 4G port, as I have a Nano.  I do know that as time goes on, battery life and usability of the rockbox iPod port will improve, and surpass the apple firmware.  In many aspects, it already does.  The devs are trying to understand how to use certain chips in the iPod, and how to utilize the second processor, which will improve battery life, and eliminate skips during playback.  It just takes time and much patience.

[jonah1980]

thanks for your reply, at most i can get roughly 4hours playback after a full charge, does this sound about right?

i've been testing it today...

[mightybrick]

That sounds about right.  With my Nano I get roughly 7-8 hours of playback, depending on how often I turn on the backlight.  The big difference is the Nano uses flash memory- there's no harddrive to spin up, thus saving lots of battery.

[soap]

CPU frequency scaling is believed to be the cause of the crashes on 4th generation ipods.  There is a patch in the tracker to disable it, but this means your ipod will run at 75mhz full time, consuming even more power.
If you are unable to patch yourself a build, there is an Unsupported build, http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=6357.0 with this patch already applied.
4-5 hours seems about average for 4th generation ipods.

[jonah1980]

ok it's good to know that my battery is probably ok then