As cool as it is that I can get my iPod to play Doom and stuff, all that comes with a price; battery life. Noticing that it seems to go through batteries pretty quickly I thought I would take a look at the battery usage of my iPod with a cool little utility included with Rockbox called Battery Bench.
What I did was turn off the backlight and set the player to shuffle play a massive playlist until the battery dies. Battery Bench logs the voltage and whatnot into a textfile in the root directory of the iPod so you can figure out what your player is doing. The result? 5 hours 40 minutes and 42 seconds of playback.
I am not sure how that compares with other iPod video players but it seems kind of short to me. I have seen people posting results of 10+ hours for other players. Even that time is cut pretty dramatically if I start doing a stuff that involves backlight (i.e. Doom or Arknoid). Ultimately the longevity of the battery is not that big a deal for me. If it gets me to work they I am happy but I am hoping that future versions can improve that a bit (or alot). As Rockbox evolves I will run more of these bench tests and post the results.
I think rockbox does not play as long as apple’s firmware,. and wi will tst it with my nano too
I have convinced two of my coworkers to try out rockbox. I will see if I can get their data as well and I will post it. One uses an iPod Nano and the other uses an iAudio X5.
Is there a way to benchmark the battery life of the Apple firmware?
I did run another benchmark but I ended up playing around with it during the test so the data is not good. It was looking like it was going to run longer that time though.
The difference was that I inverted the screen colors (white text on a black background instead of black text on a white background), which I think looks cooler and should use less power.
I will try again soon!
Same for the Sansa e200 series – I went from 18 hrs firmware to under 10 Rockbox. This seems to happen to all players.
my sansa e250 is running 16h30m on rockbox. i dont know how long it was before
I’m using Rockbox on an iPod nano 2G and it even improves the runtime by about 30%.
I am going to have another look at Rockbox when I get my next Audio player. I suspect that things have improved a lot in the 4 years since I wrote that post.