I just got an iPod video 80GB (previous 5th generation) for my portable solution. I am using the Rebel Forces firmware Rockbox. It does flac, and frees your iPod from the Apple's Evil Empire (alas, this is what they've become.)
http://www.rockbox.org/ Issues: No Rockbox yet on the latest generation of iPod/Phone/Touch, and unlikely anytime soon due to good encryption on the new Apple firmware. This is why I bought a used iPod Video, the largest HD based player that runs Rockbox. Some refurb units are currently still available from apple.com. Used on craigslist or ebay. Battery life is less both due to flacs needing to access the HD more, and that Rockbox isn't (yet) as efficient as the apple firmware, but improvements in this may be expected. On older platforms Rockbox does better on battery life than the native firmwares. I use mine most in the car or in the hotel room while traveling, I'm not much for walking around with headphones on. Could be an issue on a long airplane flight. Video is not as good on Rockbox as with the native apple firmware, but Rockbox allows dual booting, so one could watch video with the native firmware. I don't like to watch video on tiny screens, so not an issue for me. Not all iPod accessories that interface with the ipod beyond power and line out (remotes and such) work with Rockbox. Simple folder-bassed organization, keeps its own database, provides for recording. Nice skins. Free, open source and customizable. Other advantages. I'm loving it so far. I have a very large collection, and didn't want to maintain an mp3 mirror, and I didn't want to spend the time converting files. This seems to be the best solution for me. I'm still hoping for flac support to come from Apple at some future time. -- bephillips More than 35611 songs on 2849 albums by 2050 artists. Mostly flac, some mp3. SlimServer Version: 6.5.3 - 12361 Mac OS X 10.4.10 (8R218) - EN - utf8 Perl Version: 5.8.6 darwin-thread-multi-2level MySQL Version: 5.0.22-standard On a 1.2GHz G4 Mac iBook with 768MB RAM http://db.etree.org/bephillips ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bephillips's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2588 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39762 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
