Rockbox Issues

Now, I'll be honest: A Rockboxed iPod has several drawbacks. First and foremost, the iPod's unique scroll wheel is miserable to use when the on-screen interface doesn't scroll faster as you kick your thumb into high gear, speeding around the dial. This feature is called acceleration (just like the mouse acceleration on your PC--the faster you move your mouse, the more distance the pointer covers). It takes forever to scroll through long listings (and you end up with long listings when you have 80 gigs of music) if the menu selector doesn't speed up when your thumb does--and regrettably, current builds of Rockbox don't support list acceleration on iPods. To get list acceleration, I'm actually running a custom Rockbox build that includes a patch to the Rockbox source code enabling the feature on the iPod.

My Rockboxed video iPod suffers a few other shortcomings. One is that video is not well supported. A stock video iPod plays H.264 video files beautifully; Rockbox includes a video plug-in that is still in its very early stages. Only certain types of MPEG files are supported, playback can be jerky, and fast-forward and rewind features are not yet in place. (Still images are supported just fine, so you can use a Rockboxed iPod as a photo viewer.)

Rockbox cannot read any music files that contain DRM, so you'll need to strip that poison out of any files you purchase online before moving them to your player. And every now and again, Rockbox puts my iPod into a state where it thinks its battery is dead and refuses to start up. Holding down the Menu and Select buttons for a few seconds (forcing an iPod hard reset) clears up the problem, but it is annoying.

Putting Rockbox on your iPod won't make Steve Jobs happy (quite the opposite, I imagine), and technically it voids your iPod's warranty. As long as the iPod is able to power up, however, removing Rockbox from the device entirely, leaving little or even no trace behind, is rather easy. (It's also worth noting that when Rockbox is installed, if you ever want to fire up Apple's stock interface, you can, since Rockbox provides the equivalent of dual-booting. You won't see any music listed in that interface, though, since Apple's firmware expects iTunes-scrambled files to be living on the device.)

I run Rockbox for two main reasons: I need OGG file support, and I demand unscrambled file storage. But I also run it because I prefer open-source programs, with their vibrant, intertwined developer and user communities, to commercial apps, with their from-the-top-down approach.

When was the last time an iPod user got to discuss the pluses and minuses of the iPod's interface with an Apple developer, perhaps having an impact on future revisions? This sort of thing happens in the Rockbox forums all the time. I also like knowing that if I learn enough C, I can tinker with Rockbox's code myself. And if I never get around to that, I can persuade or hire a smarter geek somewhere to do the coding for me. The custom Rockbox build I'm running benefits directly from work done by exactly this type of smarter geek.

Precisely because it is governed by the freedoms that define Free Software, Rockbox will continue to grow and learn new tricks over time, and my iPod will be along for the ride.

Matthew Newton is PC World's QA Engineer, but takes a break once each month to cover the world of open-source and Free Software. (More often than not, the topic is Linux, but anything open and Free is fair game.) Would you consider replacing your media player's brains with Rockbox? Why or why not? Speak Freely in the Comments section below!