OK, Rockbox runs great, but I have a confession to make: I actually prefer the Clip+ original firmware (o.f.) It’s simple, uncluttered, and intuitive. Rockbox takes more buttons and menus than the o.f. to find and play my music, and lots more buttons to find and set options. But there’s a HUGE reason to use RB, and that’s battery life – the battery lasts a whole lot longer running RB than o.f.
So, two questions. First, has anyone actually benchtested a comparison of the battery life of RB vs. o.f.?
And second, if Rockbox can achieve better battery life, why can’t Sandisk? This is, obviously, a firmware issue. Why hasn’t Sandisk fixed this? They’d sell more players if they could advertise a longer battery life, right?
@drlucky wrote:
well i can answer the question in your sig. when you hit 800 posts
I guess you were right, Marvin. I was remembering it was 900, but seems I was mistaken.
My feeble, old grey matter just ain’t what it used to be. 
drlucky wrote:
well i can answer the question in your sig. when you hit 800 posts
I guess you were right, Marvin. I was remembering it was 900, but seems I was mistaken.
My feeble, old Guru grey matter just ain’t what it used to be.
@comfortablynumb wrote:
But there’s a HUGE reason to use RB, and that’s battery life – the battery lasts a whole lot longer running RB than o.f.
I think this is true for basically all formats except mp3, where the OF does pretty good and shouldn’t be much less then rockbox. If you’re using mp3 and like the OF, I’d probably just use it, at least for now. I’m working on more mp3 stuff which will hopefully put rockbox further ahead, but its still a little off. Plus theres other stuff in rockbox that still wastes some power that needs fixing.
@comfortablynumb wrote:
And second, if Rockbox can achieve better battery life, why can’t Sandisk? This is, obviously, a firmware issue. Why hasn’t Sandisk fixed this? They’d sell more players if they could advertise a longer battery life, right?
Its a lot of work for small gains. Plus its very hard for companies to do this sort of optimization since they usually buy their decoders rather then write them. We have the advantage in that mt, linuxstb and I wrote some or even all of the bits in most of the rockbox decoders. Doing that took us years, but now we have really good decoders that we can optimize as much as we like.
