As it appears in the recent CVS activity, the team behind the superb Rockbox are working on supporting iPod Color/Photo and iPod Nano. The work is still initial, and I have no knowledge if the work is meant for testing or if there is an actual plan.

Rockbox on iPod would most probably mean Ogg Vorbis, mpc, ac3, Wavepack and flac support on iPod (along with Apple Lossless, mp3 and aac). The only downside I can think of is that Rockbox have no DRM support, and that music from iTunes Music Store cannot be played.

Although I will never trade my iRiver H140, I find this exciting news.

Yes, there is a plan to port Rockbox to the iPod and as you saw in the CVS activity, work is progressing.

I have no reason to believe the port will not be finished - all the hard work in terms of the low level hardware drivers has already been done by the iPodLinux people.

Once the port is working, all Rockbox features such as gapless playback, crossfade and replaygain will work exactly the same as on the iriver H1x0 port.

I wonder if codecs will run as smoothly. At a first moment, I suspect some of them won't, as they are optimized for m68K and not ARM.

A lot of the optimisation done on the Rockbox codecs involved making the best use of the very fast 96KB internal RAM on the Coldfire (m68k) CPU. This means optimising them to use as little memory as possible, and deciding which data structures, code and buffers give the most benefit when being in IRAM.

The PP5020 (ARM) processor inside the iPod also has 96KB of fast internal RAM, so in this respect both devices are identical and all that work can just be transferred "as is".

Some of the codecs (libmad, maybe Tremor) already have ARM assembler optimisations in the official source - for the Coldfire we had to start from scratch.

Dave.

This is definitely welcome news. I may end up finally purchasing a DAP. I've been wanting to buy something that Rockbox supports, but it's been a while since anything it's supported has been in production. Shouldn't be too hard to find an iPod though, they seem to be a bit popular.

I would buy an iPod inmediately if it supported RockBox

Then it would be the ultimate DAP!

The hype would be justified.

I hope its ready by the time my Karma dies.

Duuuuuuuuude I'm VERY excited about this. I just bought a Nano a few weeks ago, and love it (for what it is--convenient/small/takeeverywhere) but man it could be so much better...

You don't realise how nice Rockbox truly is until you use it Once you do you don't ever want to give it up.

Although I don't own an iPod I do own a device that Rockbox runs on, an iRiver H140, and it turned a very good DAP into an amazingly good DAP. Personally I'd like to see Rockbox ported to a lot of players so everyone can enjoy it.

Exactly the same here.

If Rockbox gets up and running on an iPod this will make Apple very very rich (as if it isn't).

I think Rockbox on iPod is great, but do you really think it's going to raise Apples sales noticeably - i don't.

Well, my Karma just died... I'd like one of these VideoPods with Rockbox

I just looked through the CVS, and theres been a ton of activity the last few days on the Ipod port. Evidently they already have the bootloader, screendriver, and other functions working on the ipod. Lets hope they can keep the momentum.

I hope Musepack is able to be easily optimized for the iPods.... Would be so sweet.

Wow, interesting news.
I just installed the iPodlinux on my nano yesterday.
Music support, games (iDoom), very cool.
If I have the time, today I will install ipl+podzilla with Mpd support (meaning gapless mp3 using helix decoder by what I heard)

[EDIT] Forgot to mention , video support too

I'm amazend how the iPodLinux guys manage to break so many licenses while developing their shit :B

"Oh, this soft's sources are available? Let's throw it in! 'COPYING'? WTF is that file?"

They should take some licensing classes from the RockBox guys.

just a little...

Good point. As i've said before i'll buy any player that supports musepack - my phone does (Windows Mobile 2003 with betaplayer) but i'd like a proper player. Feel free to flame my choice of codec, but it's the only thing stopping me buying a player...

Yup. Doesn't it piss you off that good hardware is crippled by marketing led firmware?

That goes double if not triple or quadruple for Sony hardware. Whatever happened to the great Walkman inventor???

He died. (Akio Morita)

I'll have to admit, gapless Vorbis playback on a black 4GB Nano would be kind of neat

Wow, fantastic, i'm waiting that RockBox for Ipod is released, and i'm going to buy a nano

Which really stands for: a.k.a. Muerte