Rockbox
I don't know if any of you are familiar with Rockbox, but I'm going to go ahead and rave about it now.
Rockbox is a free, open source OS for various mp3 players, including iPod of course. It's fairly easy to download and install from rockbox.org. You load some new firmware onto your iPod, leaving the original firmware alone in case you want it again sometime. Initially the interface is bland and really kind of sucks, but that can be easily fixed by loading one of many downloadable themes.
As far as I can tell, the drawbacks of this OS are the lack of video playback, slight gap between tracks (though a fraction of the old iPod's track gap), and its navigation is a little slower.
If you ask me, though, the advantages far outweigh these annoyances, especially since if you want to watch a video you can just take a few seconds to boot into the original OS. I'll just list the awesome things:
-Full theme support, and customizing themes is pretty darned easy
-Fully customizable "Now Playing" info panel
-Visualizers (including a variation on Windows screen saver "Starfield" for which your warp factor is determined by the volume of the music...sounds like the best technology ever)
-Tons of pre-loaded games, including Tetris and Doom
-More audio options than you can shake a stick at
-Recording (I think you just plug a microphone in the audio jack...)
-Text editor, calculator, and other useful applications
-Access to all aspects of ID3 tags
-More stuff I don't even know about yet
-No more strict reliance on iTunes
Basically, I think it's pretty awesome. Sometimes, open source really works. If you've got a little time to play around with it, I highly recommend at least trying it.
Edit: There is video support. It's only mpeg-compatible, but that's not bad considering the iPod's original support for video formats.
Rockbox is a free, open source OS for various mp3 players, including iPod of course. It's fairly easy to download and install from rockbox.org. You load some new firmware onto your iPod, leaving the original firmware alone in case you want it again sometime. Initially the interface is bland and really kind of sucks, but that can be easily fixed by loading one of many downloadable themes.
As far as I can tell, the drawbacks of this OS are the lack of video playback, slight gap between tracks (though a fraction of the old iPod's track gap), and its navigation is a little slower.
If you ask me, though, the advantages far outweigh these annoyances, especially since if you want to watch a video you can just take a few seconds to boot into the original OS. I'll just list the awesome things:
-Full theme support, and customizing themes is pretty darned easy
-Fully customizable "Now Playing" info panel
-Visualizers (including a variation on Windows screen saver "Starfield" for which your warp factor is determined by the volume of the music...sounds like the best technology ever)
-Tons of pre-loaded games, including Tetris and Doom
-More audio options than you can shake a stick at
-Recording (I think you just plug a microphone in the audio jack...)
-Text editor, calculator, and other useful applications
-Access to all aspects of ID3 tags
-More stuff I don't even know about yet
-No more strict reliance on iTunes
Basically, I think it's pretty awesome. Sometimes, open source really works. If you've got a little time to play around with it, I highly recommend at least trying it.
Edit: There is video support. It's only mpeg-compatible, but that's not bad considering the iPod's original support for video formats.