[Ipodlinux-devel] Re: Linux Firmware and MP3 Playing

[Jim W. <js...@bl...>]

   Doesn't the iPod have a hardware MP3 decoder (/encoder?) chip in it?  
Can it be accessed yet from Linux?

   By "isn't very useful" - what exactly does this mean?  Are we talking 
realtime decoding of full 320bps, 16-bit, 44KhZ, stereo MP3s.  Because 
I've got an MP3 player on the Newton (169 KHz StrongARM or whatever the 
clock speed is) that runs pretty decently with MP3s of 80bps, mono, 
8bit.  I'm told it'll go up to 128 and not choke much.  The main 
bottleneck is probably the Newton's low-level memory system (it doesn't 
seem to like to deal with big VBOs on the stores).  But the iPod's got 
TWO ARMs (hmm, interesting pun..), so could MP3 decoding just be 
shunted to the "back" processor" while everything else goes on on the 
front one?  Do we know how to access both processors and get some kind 
of MP working?

   I guess for the really daring, an interesting experiment would be to 
try to plug a CF reader or whatever directly into the PCMCIA CardBus 
that the hard drive is on.

   (The just hook  it up with two open slots, rearrange the electronics 
to fit in a sligtly bigger case, but a bigger grayscale screen on it 
with a touchpad, figure out how the MMU works, port the damn Newton ROM 
(already in ARM code, that should help a little ;), rewrite the 
TScreenDriver, TVoyagerPlatformImpl. TResistiveTablet, 
PCirrusSoundDriver, and probably several other classes, and we're done. 
  Voila!  New Newton, courtesy of Apple and a lot of hard work..)

Jim

> I would be interested in a compact flash card reader solution for the 
> ipod.
> However I was under the impression that the available linux firmware 
> isn't
> very useful as an mp3 player. Is it possible to dual boot the ipod? I 
> wouldn't