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.