jdong
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clubs:   | reply to justin
Re: ipod nano video on linux
Justin, the new nanos expose a mass storage device interface??
I have an iPod Touch which doesn't even do that.
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benyto
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| said by jdong  :Justin, the new nanos expose a mass storage device interface?? I was curious about that point, as well. |
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justin
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| When I plug in the ipod, I have /dev/sdb1 which is a directory tree and all the ipod manipulation programs do is manipulate files in that filesystem, so for instance new music files go in FXX sub-directories. Shrug. The ultimate low level utility is gnupod which is a bunch of perl that offers command line utilities for pushing files to the filesystem and updating gnutunes.db (made from itunes.db).
I thought it was always like that, and I have an old ipod mini that does the same thing? where is the super proprietary tricky code here?
The type of the filesystem is different for "windows" init ipod vs "mac" init ipod, thats about it? |
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benyto
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| One of the points I'm trying to make is that the use of an Ipod requires external software to operate at all. Whether you see it as simplistic or not is largely irrelevant. Any upstream change has the potential to make your current software environment stop functioning, causing you to go through this again sometime in the future.
I suspect I'm in the minority here, but when I bought my player I made sure it absolutely required nothing else in order for me to use it. As long as computer's OS supports USB mass storage devices I am able to get media on to and off of the device, and the device can play it without any problems. No file structure limitations, no need to update a database.
Your beef is legitimate. I'd be frustrated, too.
As for the Ipod USB mass storage issue, I was under the impression that the units did not operate as a standard USB HDD. One that you could plug in to a computer without Ipod-specific software and use as a storage volume. Perhaps my impressions were incorrect. |
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jdong
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clubs:
| reply to justin
(1) The iPhone and iPod Touches do *NOT* expose a mass storage device at all
(2) The iTunesDB file on the 6th generation has another hash field that must be updated else the DB gets rejected.
(3) See the GTKPOD section of »https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Portab···s/iPhone
This new release of gtkpod apparently is required for the iTunesDB hash field to be generated
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justin
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| this is an ipod nano, not a touch or an iphone..
The hash part is fine, I checked the XML file on the exported mass storage file-system. It isn't a problem of files getting loaded but not getting indexed (which would be the hash getting set incorrectly), it is that gtkpod doesn't work with video files (refuses to deal with the mp4/m4v file) and amarok doesn't even have the concept of video. |
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justin
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1 edit | In case anyone else finds this topic, here is what I've done so far.
1. Despite the gtkpod being updated for video support at the end of 2005 .. ( see »www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/initial-···-libgpod ) the ubuntu gtkpod and gtkpod-aac programs do not understand video, and give a message normally associated with gtkpod being told to deal with an AAC file.
2. gtkpod is a bear to re-build manually from a normal ubuntu install. I had to google each configure failure to identify the missing packages. Several pulled in whole rafts of others. Here is the minimum path:
At this point you have a gtkpod that can handle m4v files.. at least the ones I am making using handbrakeCLI (there is no gui version of handbrake for linux, only windows and OSX). A guide to using handbrakeCLI is here »handbrake.m0k.org/trac/wiki/CLIGuide
I just set the width, height, encoding bit-rate, set two-pass. Converted the "longest title" of my DVD (another flag). mp4 is implied by an output file extension of .mp4, and I selected AAC as the audio with a bitrate of 128.
HandbrakeCLI pauses after two passes and looks like it hangs, but it eventually completes. This 40 whatever minute 200mb file paused for about 10 minutes at the end showing 0.0% complete, after about 30 minutes of processing (this is a slow laptop).
mp4info comes from the libmp4v2 library util directory, so a first check is that it can grok your video file..
plays great, appears in Video menu of ipod correctly.
Whew.
Now correct me if I'm wrong here but I think only the geekiest of ubuntu users are going to go through this to get their christmas ipod up and running under linux. |
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