Workaround For Audio Bookmarks


imhotep

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Joined
Nov 6, 2006
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I am contemplating buying a GP2X, but I am a big podcast listener and want to be able to bookmark my shows (ideally). I don't want to have to remember that I am 42:05 through listening to a podcast or audio book.

From researching these forums it seems apparent that although the video player now has a bookmarking feature (due to the new firmware), the audio player still does not have this. None of the alternative players do either it seems.

Is it possible to play audio with the video player and thus get access to a bookmarking feature?
Are there any workarounds/tips that you podcast / audio book fans out there have discovered?
Can any of the audio players, at the very least, remember exactly where you are up to when you turn the device off and on?
 
At least half of the time that I use my gp2x, it's for podcasts during my morning commute and walk from the parking lot into the office. I have two 1gb SD cards -one for games and one for podcasts (video and audio). I have mp3 and ogg podcasts and I convert the mp4 video podcasts to avi with divx video/mp3 audio using "Super".

I just have to try and remember where I left off in my podcast even though this is a real pain. Usually it's not too much hassle, but with the 2.1.0 firmware I hear the fast-forward isn't fast anymore, so I'll stick with 2.0.0 firmware for now. I also read that the alternative audio players don't always handle large mp3s well, or don't have any bookmark feature anyway. I have put in a request to Gamepark Holdings on their message board about the bookmark being added to the audio player, but I don't know if they read it.

Your idea about trying to get audio to play in the video player is a good one. Right now I don't think it'll show you a filetype in the video player that isn't avi or mpg and I think ogv? I'll try and rename an mp3 to just mpg to see if it'll just play it and maybe that'll be a good work-around! I guess I could also try and convert an mp3 into an mpg format just with no video, but I'm not keen on re-encoding every podcast every time unless I can script it I guess.

I'll let you know if I find some better way with podcasts.
 
I'm not keen on re-encoding every podcast every time unless I can script it I guess.
You could try renaming an .mp3 file to .avi

I don't know about mpg files, but avi files mostly have an mp3 audio stream. This means the video player on the GP2X should definitely deal with the MP3 codec. No re-encoding would be necessary. The only potential problem is whether the video player would reject the renamed file for not having a video stream.

Thanks for looking into this for me.
 
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I'm not keen on re-encoding every podcast every time unless I can script it I guess.
You could try renaming an .mp3 file to .avi

I don't know about mpg files, but avi files mostly have an mp3 audio stream. This means the video player on the GP2X should definitely deal with the MP3 codec. No re-encoding would be necessary. The only potential problem is whether the video player would reject the renamed file for not having a video stream.

Thanks for looking into this for me.


Right you are! I renamed an .mp3 to .avi and the video player did show it in the filelist and it started to play with no issues. The problems were that there is no button to turn off the backlight to conserve power for the video player. Aaaaaaaand, the worst thing was that it didn't ask me if I wanted to resume where I left off when I came back into the Video player like it does for real .avi files. Sometimes the "Would you like to resume the movie" would show up upon starting the video player, but it never actually jumped forward. You can't manually set bookmarks, so it seems the bookmark (resume) type feature doesn't actually work for just mp3 files.

Darn, I thought you had a good idea there!
 
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Thanks for the quick investigation. Disappointing that it didn't work out but worth a shot I guess... :-/

I am very spoiled by my PDA's multimedia capabilities, but my other half wants it back and I was gonna buy a GP2X as a replacement. Maybe I should get an iPod. Nah!

Edit: Oh and I guess you must have tried the new firmware. How was it? Was the video player fast forward annoying?
 
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