Usb Hd Compatiblity

[arconreef]

I'm assuming that the Pandora would work with external usb hd's right? Flash drives aren't gonna cut it for me. I would like at least 40gb of space, and 60gb would be perfect.

Also, VLC media player would work on it right? It'd be big for me if Pandora could play video & audio. I could throw out ye olde media player, along with emptying a 1/4 of my pc's hd (roms, roms, and more roms).

Sorry for not knowing any of this, I'm a noob.

Thanx! Knowing that it will run VLC will rule out the possibility of getting an eeePC. The Pandora will be well worth the wait. Especially with the built in emulation capabilities, and customized controls. I only wish it could emulate PC. Oh, and as for the usb HD, I'll just have to be by a power source when I'm using it.

 

[greendots]

Should be yes and yes. a bus powered harddrive is going to cut down on your battery life though. VLC player is available for ARM processors (which is what pandora is).

 

[Zarneth]

Short answer: 95% yes.

Long answer: The pandora will theoretically be able to do almost anything a PC running linux can do. The only catches are driver/software support, and hardware limitations such as CPU speed and what connectors it has.

If I'm not mistaken USB flash drives and USB hdd's use the same protocol anyway though so the Pandora will barely know the difference. Just don't expect to run a hard drive that draws ALL it's power from the usb. It might work but you'd be best getting one with a power brick.

The big question is though, WHY do you need that much space? Give it a year and you'll probably not have too much trouble getting 2x 16gb SD cards.

Another option also is playing your videos and such directly off a network folder, over the wifi. Though that would depend on how fast the wifi connection is. I frequently play videos over a lan cable in linux though and it still has really snappy seek times and such.

 

[nubie]

The GP2X has full support for hard drives. It is a function of Linux, and a USB standard. I am sure that they will be using a new enough kernel that this will be a non-issue. I hope that mounting will be automatic.

The real question if if it will have NTFS support, although there isn't really a need.

If the wifi supports samba shares I will likely run everything off of my network. NAS boxes are becoming really popular.

 

[Snu]

there wont be any problems with reading data off usb harddrives, but if its a 3.5" one, it will require an outside power source. im not sure about 2.5" ones... they run off the usb power, but they might require more than the usb standard (which most computers provide, but the pandora will not).
you might want to consider sdhc cards tho, 16gb ones are out now, and prices are falling quick (just under $60 from what i can see), in a few months you'll be able to get a 32gb card for under $100 im sure. and you have no battery issues, no worry about carrying around a seperate box.

 

[JakeK]

So can I expect a decent media player then? (plays multiple formats and codecs)

 

[klikklak]

So can I expect a decent media player then? (plays multiple formats and codecs)

Yeah you should (and I certainly am). VLC seems to compile for arm, so either that or mplayer. There's plenty of linux media players around. On a side note, gp2x really got the video playing down. I mean particularly setting bookmarks in video. It works like a charm and I really hope this will be implemented ASAP. The nokia internet tablets still (well, I dunno, I've only got a 770) don't do this.

 

[craigix]

For the sake of the battery life you should consider 2x32GB SD cards or using a flash based HDD, You don't HAVE to but that would make a lot more sence in the portable world.

 

[A_SN]

Which makes me wonder, how much does a hard drive iPod draw from the USB port?

 

[_VWV_]

Which makes me wonder, how much does a hard drive iPod draw from the USB port?

Something like 500mA I think. + It eats up about 0.8-1 A to start up, but I thought it uses it's battery for that.

arconreef

I think, it would be nice to connect an ipod (or any other self-powered HDD) via USB OTG. In the later case we can make it work from it's internal battery. In any case the power drain will be huge and I highly doubt, you'll be able to watch a 3 hours movie.

 

[squeakypants]

Also, you should consider you will be able to stream videos over WiFi (when you're at home, that is). Isn't that a feature of VLC? ...isn't that why it's called VideoLAN?

 

[javaJake]

VLC seems to compile for arm, so either that or mplayer.

VLC gets all the attention because it has the better GUI. But we Linux fans all know that GUI tools are not always the best. If you take time to learn mplayer, you'll enjoy it hereafter.

(Did I mention I haven't even touched VLC yet?)

 

[A_SN]

VLC gets all the attention because it has the better GUI.

huh, what about streaming?? What are the streaming capabilities of mplayer btw?

I think, it would be nice to connect an ipod (or any other self-powered HDD) via USB OTG. In the later case we can make it work from it's internal battery. In any case the power drain will be huge and I highly doubt, you'll be able to watch a 3 hours movie.

Yeah, I really wonder how we could make it so that we could use an iPod through USB but not charge its battery at the same time.

 

[Kramy]

I'd have to favour VLC for this one.

VLC doesn't play audio on my computer...beats me why...but for a Pandora that's a non-issue.

Mplayer has a really red hue, and I can't figure out how to fix it!...

But they both have horrible image quality compared to ffdshow; after spending hours tweaking everything, ffdshow provides amazing results...too bad it's windows only, and uses too much CPU power to be feasible.

 

[_VWV_]

I think, it would be nice to connect an ipod (or any other self-powered HDD) via USB OTG. In the later case we can make it work from it's internal battery. In any case the power drain will be huge and I highly doubt, you'll be able to watch a 3 hours movie.

Yeah, I really wonder how we could make it so that we could use an iPod through USB but not charge its battery at the same time.


http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebO...amera+connector - This is actually a USB-OTG controller for ipods.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/06/i...photo_conn.html
The only problem I see here is to switch the roles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go). I doubt ipods support the HNP, This is the problem, coz: (https://www.muru.com/linux/n800-usb-host/) "the device that has a miniA plug will become the device-A (host)". So the question is (sorry my noobness) if we can take a miniA(male)-to-A(male) cable and modify it's A end so that it doesn't ground the ID line?

 

[JakeK]

VLC seems to compile for arm, so either that or mplayer.

VLC gets all the attention because it has the better GUI. But we Linux fans all know that GUI tools are not always the best. If you take time to learn mplayer, you'll enjoy it hereafter.

(Did I mention I haven't even touched VLC yet?)


Doesn't the GP2X F200 use Mplayer because I find it absolutely dreadful to use, in fact I can't use it much at all because of how picky the crappy thing is. Is it because the GP2x version is shit and the full one is not?

 

[Snu]

But they both have horrible image quality compared to ffdshow; after spending hours tweaking everything, ffdshow provides amazing results...too bad it's windows only, and uses too much CPU power to be feasible.

ffdshow is a codec pack, not a media player, they are two entirely different things. i use ffdshow with vlc on my windows computers (tho i prefer media player classic).

as for linux based media players, i would most like a port of mpd (audio only, i know, but thats 99% of the media i'll be playing), then i could probably make my own gui for it.

and the ipod thing, just install ipodlinux or rockbox on it, im sure it would be possible to implement usb reading without charging then

 

[nubie]

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebO...amera+connector - This is actually a USB-OTG controller for ipods.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/06/i...photo_conn.html
The only problem I see here is to switch the roles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go). I doubt ipods support the HNP, This is the problem, coz: (https://www.muru.com/linux/n800-usb-host/) "the device that has a miniA plug will become the device-A (host)". So the question is (sorry my noobness) if we can take a miniA(male)-to-A(male) cable and modify it's A end so that it doesn't ground the ID line?



THERE IS FULL USB, THE PANDORA DOES NOT USE MINI USB.*

The pandora has a Full-size, standard USB port, it is in the back, it will plug in all of the standard USB devices.

I am not yelling at you, I just want to make sure that other people don't get the wrong idea (editing your post to reflect this would be a good idea.)

* for connecting hard drives, keyboards, mice gamepads, joysticks, etc. The mini usb is used for other purposes, using devices with the pandora is physically identical to your standard desktop/laptop computer.

 

[Squidge]

THERE IS FULL USB, THE PANDORA DOES NOT USE MINI USB.

Yes it does, thats how it connects to the PC.



However, it does contain a full size usb-host connector.

</nitpick>

 

[javaJake]

huh, what about streaming?? What are the streaming capabilities of mplayer btw?

QUOTE

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies..

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.


For more information, see: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html

IIRC, mplayer does subtitles three times better than VLC.

I'd have to favour VLC for this one.

Mplayer has a really red hue, and I can't figure out how to fix it!...

Just because your experience with mplayer was bad, doesn't mean everyone else will hate it as well. I find quite a few people saying Ubuntu stinks (out of the thousands that are happy), but in reality it's only because Ubuntu didn't work for them completely.

Doesn't the GP2X F200 use Mplayer because I find it absolutely dreadful to use, in fact I can't use it much at all because of how picky the crappy thing is. Is it because the GP2x version is shit and the full one is not?

You were probably dealing with a GUI frontend. mplayer GUI's are not the best, and they hide a lot of the advanced functionality available. I've tried gmplayer myself, and every experience has been terrible.