I just downloaded Rockbox for my brand new 5G video iPod. It's amazing! I can't believe there are only 3 posts in this whole forum even mentioning it!
Finally, on an iPod (of all things) I have a portable player that:
- Plays perfectly gapless ogg and flac files (verified with side 2 of Abbey Road last night)
- Has a feature that pauses the player when power is removed and restarts it when power is reapplied (so I can use it in my car without losing my place and running the ipod's battery down because I forgot to pause it before I got out of the car)
- Bookmarking (save where you are on multiple files)
- ReplayGain (though I'm not 100% sure it's working yet)
There are a lot of other amazing features (everything from different skins to a port of Doom!) you can read about here:
http://www.rockbox.org/The only feature it doesn't have is MediaCenter support! Right now I just drag and drop directories. I would love to have the hotsync, playlist, podcast, etc. features I have with Apple's ipod software + MC11.1. This seems like a natural fit: MediaCenter is developed by a great team of people who "get it" and are constantly improving their software. It's the same for the RockBox guys. At the end of January they had just gotten basic sound working. 3 months later they have a product so good I don't know if I'll ever boot back into Apple mode.
If you're nervous about trying it out - it's easy to install, and you can choose between Rockbox or iPod whenever you reset your iPod. I used this installer:
http://tinyurl.com/fubmc If you have a 5G video ipod, use the DOS-based version 4 (the higher GUI versions don't work for the 5G yet). Other ipods can use the latest GUI installer. All the different versions of the installer do the exact same thing, the only thing that's changing is the user interface, so don't sweat using an older installer. There's also an uninstall option.
I highly recommend anyone with a:
Apple: iPod 4th gen (grayscale and color), 5th gen (Video), Nano and Mini 1st/2nd gen
Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
iRiver: H100 and H300 series
iAudio: X5 (including X5V and X5L)
check this out, and let the great developers at jriver know if you'd like to see MC support for it.
I would, in case that's not clear yet.
Cheers,
Fred