Displaying more colors/shades on these old LCDs was simple. All you have to do is to alternate pixel color each frame and you'll get intermediate color. First it was used in software like in this iPod or there were J2ME tech demos for Siemens SL45i phone. In the first case you'll get 16 shades, in the second you'll only get 4 shades since SL45i had 1-bit screen. This technique was widely adopted in LCD displays. For years most monitors and TV had 6-bit panels, but with FRC (which does the same in hardware) they were able to display 8-bit shades. Currently it is used in low-end and mid-range displays, but now we have 8-bit panels and FRC brings them up to 10-bit for HDR content. In early days such technique wasn't used in hardware, since LCDs had much lower quality. My SL45i had inconsistent shades in few lines. Still better than 1-bit, but not good enough for commercial use case.

The breakout game in the original firmware of the original iPod WAS a hidden easter egg, but in later software updates they put it in the menu.

no green ipad disappointed

Your videos are like comfort food to me. Like mums spaghetti bolognaise or a favourite movie you’ve seen so many times it’s just comforting to watch now. I love the mechanical hard disk aspect about the older iPods. The way they used their flash buffer and only span the drive when necessary. Such gorgeous pieces of technology. Thanks for this vid and Keep up the good work my brother.

I really like the way you narrate these videos. You get straight to the point, you talk not too loud, not too quiet. I feel like I can have these playing in the background when I'm doing something stressful and this would be a nice remedy. Super rare to find a youtuber like you. Instant subscribe.

i had Rockbox installed on a tiny Sansa Clip+. the screen was a miniscule blue OLED with an amber strip across the top. Rockbox made this little gadget run just about everything. i even made my own theme for it. my favorite feature of Rockbox however was the TalkBack feature that generates voice titles for all the artists and albums. i used this so i could navigate to where i wanted without looking at it, like when i was driving or taking a walk.

0:45 "That's what she said" 😂😂 the description was spot on

I cannot believe that an iPod first/second get can play Doom and MP4s! Thank you so much for this video!

I used rockbox with an iriver with a little smaller disk drive (8gb had inside i think) to hack my ps3 and jailbreak it around 2009 i think. I used to let the iriver connected to the ps3 usb and as it booted up it delivered a payload to jailbreak the ps3 and run homebrew and backups. Then i got a infinite trade in (in rental ps3 games) for one month and backed up 60 or more of the best ps3 games. Those were the days :)

The reason Breakout is on the iPod is because Jobs and, well, mainly Wozniak designed the circuit board for the arcade machine, when Jobs was still working at Atari. It was their first successful product, before founding Apple.

When I saw a video with the title "iPod DOOM" I knew I would be seeing some Rockbox. I haven't used it for a long time, but it's such a great piece of software. I hope its development continues for a long time. I honestly wish there were an equivalent for iPhones.

Rockbox is awesome. Been using it for over 10 years. With my SanDisk Sansa clip plus. That i bought back in 2011.

Only has 4 shades of grey? Tha's MORE than enough to play the "Bad Apple!!" video.

I got my iPod (1st gen) the very same week it was released in 2001. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and i remember when i would use it around school, teachers and other students alike would CONSTANTLY come up to me and ask me what this thing was that I was using! Hard to believe it's been so long now~!

I still use a 5.5G iPod Video with Rockbox as my main portable music player. Other upgrades I've done include a vastly bigger battery, 512GB storage and the diyMod output stage bypass so I can feed the analogue output from the DAC directly to a headphone amp via the dock connector bypassing any additional filtering (the headphone jack still functions as normal)

that grayscale screen is so calming to the eyes. love that they also paired it with a white backlight ❤

I used to run daily Rockbox on sandisk players and it was awesome. Better sound, better battery, video playback...

Rockbox is an amazing piece of software. I had it on every music player I've ever owned. It worked really well on my Sandisk devices with real buttons, those worked really well for playing games. You essentially had a small handheld game console in your pocket. Sadly, they have replaced physical buttons with a touchpad on the final model I had, the Fuze+. That one was essentially unusable for games. Ah, memories... I still have a couple of music players with Rockbox on them which I do use from time to time.

I'd love for you to become a calmer down-to-earth version of Dank Pods, I'd definitely be watching you regularly.

I love all these interesting things you explore. I especially loved the stuff on Nokia 3310 modding and old GSM phones. Joined the Patreon. Best of luck! ❤

Always love the presentation of your videos, this one was super fun as someone who also loves tinkering with iPods! You're absolutely right about working with old hardware being both fun, but also incredibly frustrating at times!

Great intro music once again! I think Rockbox is super cool. I always wanted to see an Aussie discuss it ;) Even tho the original firmware is qualitatively better for Just Music when your formats are already supported, all the themes, games, and extra formats always makes it compelling to me. The theming especially reminds me of the R4 and similar flash carts. Even the ugly ones are fun in their own way, and some are remarkably sleek and usable.

Such a gem of a channel, love your vids!

Really enjoying both the topics of your videos and your calm voice and presentation.

FWIW, that tank/air bubbles story is probably apocryphal. The article only says it was relayed to the author by an unnamed Apple employee, the story doesn't appear in Walter Isaacson's all-encompassing biography (which includes plenty of unflattering stories about Jobs), and, perhaps most damningly, the exact same story is told about Sony co-founder Akio Morita. It may still be true, but some skepticism is warranted.

I used to run Rockbox on a Sandisk Sansa e280 in ~2008 and many other Mp3 Players after that. Now on the 6th gen IPod Classic with a bigger Battery Mod and a SD Card Mod with 512 GB Storage. Nice to see people still discovering Rockbox!

Loved it, as always. Please do more of these old Skool firmware videos

I'm sick jealous of your awesome collection of old hardware. Thanks for taking the time to show us your gadgets 😊

A Jerk is a understatement for a man named Jobs.

Finally a video from you :)

Rockbox was a savior back in the day. I used to use it on first generation Nano. It was so amazing. Wish I still had that little guy :) Awesome video as always mate :)

Awesome video, love to see some ipod content

You just blow my mind with your content! Congratulations!

Amazing video, as usual 👏

Great content as always

2:45 remind me of how I make a custom Apple bitmap logo for Nokia 5110 LCD on Arduino.

I'd love to have RockBOX on something with native Bluetooth

I stumbled your channel by accident and I must admit your videos are quite addictive i first watched your previous videos how played around with nokia phones i like that you tried playing LOR on I pod people behind LOR used I Pods. seeing what you can do with old skool tech made somewhat jealous because I wish could disassemble and put things back but I'm not good with playing with small hardware has my hands shake due to my condition cerebral palsy. which affects my fine motor skills.

I ran Rockbox on my sixth-generation iPod Classic 160GB. It was beautiful.

I was able to connect my iPod to a M2 Mac with a FireWire 400 to 800 adapter, attached to a FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt adapter, attached to a Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter. It looks ridiculous but it works and charges the iPod while connected.

Loved the video, if I had an iPod I would probably go and try rockbox. It looks like a really cool project. 7:00 I love the fact you used the Zune theme on the Windows XP machine :) Speaking of, are you going to do a video about the Zune as well? Is there a hacking scene for it?

I have the same model, it was my grandfathers. I also got my very own brand new iPod Nano in 2006~ I remember installing RockBox all the way back then and showing off to everyone at school that my original Nano could play videos, many were impressed. There also existed a few more iPod related things back then, namely iPod Wizard and iPod Linux. There was all kinds of things for iPods going on back then. Also, RockBox works particularly excellently with a Sansa e200 series mp3 player.

I’ve used rockbox on a few different things over the years. iPod classics,nanos, rca Lyra off the top of my head always runs great

Love your videos man. Never owned any apple tech but what a cool operating system! Makes me want to buy an old pod and play with it! 🙏🏻👍🏻

love that digital dark age part with install troubleshooting

Hmm, the iPod 6G (the small square with a touchscreen) is not even listed :( It would be interesting to try to "unlock" it in any way and maybe at least check what's needed to port Rockbox on one from scratch.

wow your videos have gotten so cinematic over the months!

The small port right next to the I-link connector provides power

Poetic and lyric as usual

I run Rockbox on most of my iPods. It's one hell of a custom OS.

God that sony netbook looks nice, with the zune theme and purple wallpaper; makes me feel young staring at it.... im in my mid 20's

That was really interesting, make more modding videos like this

I had trouble with rock box back in the day while installing it on my friends Sansa Clip, and my very own iPod Video. Trial and error is part of the process.

Absolutely love your videos man looking forward to more ❤🎉

ROCKBOX the only reason I owned an ipod in the 1st place, and it was a refurbished nano 1st gen. Broadcast quality audio processor, cross fade support, parametric EQ - so good.

all my music player (until phones got a respectable memory size) always had RockBox installed. it is a great little interface!

Wait, so I have like 3 rare iPod chargers? Hooray for not throwing things away, I guess. 😂

Old iPods usually click from failing hard drives.

Rockbox is great! especially using it on the 4th gen photo Edit: anything on the themes page is fully working from my knowledge

Great video, Janus! Used rockbox on my last gen ipod. But unfortunately was not able to recover to stock firmware without hdd change

I have a few old iPod's up to 6th gen, where batteries are still somewhat functional and one Creative Zen. Never heard of Rockbox, but going to try it now for sure. Luckily, I have a dozen firewire-friendly machines on hand, as well as every cable imaginable. When tech goes out of fashion, I always stack up on connectors and converters, knowing that one day they'll be impossible to find.

The rockbox version 3.15 from 2019 already is outdated. I´d highly recommend to switch to the daily/dev builds. It contains a lot of patches from the last few years since 3.15 was released. Especially improvements for flash storage.

I actually got doom on my 6th gen yesterday. It's the only pc game that doesn't make me force restart my iPod when quitting

Actually in the movie run away jury the iPod was featured as a HD

Man I must have played that breakout clone as much as any portable game I owned. 😅

I was tricked into watching an advertisement for Rockbox

I used that Zune theme on all of my Windows XP machines back in the days.

very cool video. i jailbroken my kindle 3 and now i can use custom screensavers. i think its a great ideea for a new video, to cover what you can do with modified kindle

I love when a grey scale LCD shades images always liked that...

I run rockbox on my iPod Video with the Themify theme. It’s awesome.

How did you get that shot at the end there where the camera was panning around while you were using the iPod outside? A slider of some kind?

I was shocked that it will run doom on a OG iPod.

I imagine the extra gray scale is similar to what you could do with the TI-89 to get 4 level grayscale like the Gameboy and flipping between different framebuffers faster than the pixels can reset between black and white.

I was using Rockbox on a 60GB iPod Video 5th gen with USB for years. And I've stil got it, but like the one in this video the battery is knackered.

I got through the first episode of doom on an ipod nano but playing on this must be something else

Oh man!!! thanks for this entertaining content!!! it made me get my iPod 3rd Gen out of the box one more time and listen to music!!! Thanks!!!

I really want to install RockBox on my Walkman, but I don't think my model is supported.

Thanks

Love it

i use rockbox myself on my recently acquired ipod video, it's a must-have for me as a linux user since there's virtually 0 currently-working pieces of software that support the itunes junk that the ipod expects, all the software that does currently exist either straight up crashes immediately, or can see the pre-existing music on there but can't delete it, or create new entries so, rockbox being able to build it's own library makes it a must-have, besides in the modern day itunes is notorious for not being great, so, it's just a good idea to replace even for non-linux users i think :p

did you not need itunes to transfer files on it? I am sure I had to do that even on a later model- which is why I never got a second one...

I rockboxed a sansa zip clip that has a colour screen but it's so tiny, only a few cm across but I still tried watching some videos on it, it could only play mpeg1 videos

When i was a kid my dad gave me a mini mp3 player that had rockbox on it, that's why it was so fun ! I had no idea what custom firmware even was back then Probably why I love installing custom firmware everywhere now, the phone I use daily has windows 11 on it

Still using 3rd Gen ipod classic with cf card mode and extended battery mode

The two pins which are missing in 4 pin FireWire cable/connectors is exactly the power pins, you don’t get power with them.

Unrelated but what is the windows XP theme you're using on that laptop? I love it

I love Rockbox 👍

I've installed rockbox on almost all my mp3 players, and since I'm collecting ol phones and some mp3's it was on my personal Cowon D2, on ipod mini, ipod classic, iriver h20, creative zen maybe I forgot something.

Will it play Bad Apple?

A first gen ipod being able to display video is one of those things that doesn't sound possible, yet it evidently is, and of course someone was going to port Doom 😆. Pretty impressive what 20+ years of people tinkering with them has accomplished. If I had an MP3 player that could run Rockbox I'd definitely try it, but back in the day I had a CD player (still works to this day surprisingly) and one of those generic MP3 players that look like a chunky pendrive with a screen, from there I moved to playing music on cellphones as soon as phones with expandable memory became reasonably priced.

Elite Obsolete Electronics has parts for most iPods

Yep rockboxed my iPod 6th gen and added a new battery and SSD. Runs nice. You could have run Linux on a usb stick and installed rockbox on your iPod save the stress of old versions

Would you happen to be looking to borrow an iRiver H320? ...with OEM power supply. I've been meaning to replace the battery but it works off the power so I've just been lazy. I've also never installed rockbox on it so don't know what it's _actually_ capable of, although I'm sure you'll find some 10fps videos on there i squashed myself using Xvid (if i remember that correctly) back in the day. In in NSW. Cheers bro! 👍😎🇦🇺

i always wanted one of these when i was young and could never afford one. still one of the best mp3 players ever made. even now they are better today then newer ones. i always felt the touch series was garbage the irony is sony vaio micro pcs used the exact same HDDS. i would still buy one of these if they weren't so pricey and rare

I'm running Rockbox on a iriver H10 20gb with a 128gb SD hard drive swap, but the battery is pretty much dead, if anyone knows of a battery replacement for the 20gb H10, let me know!

I still have my good old ipod classic 6.5 with a 128 gb mod on it, run rockbox like a charm ! It's my daily drive when i take the train or the bus. Work well with my grado headset

you should run ghost spectre lite on your sony vaio ux.

Rockbox is probably one of the best custom operating system I've ever use. It's not intuitive for general use but it opens so many potential for MP3 players.

next time, it would be fun to see you use a white plastic unibody macbook with this ipod. since they have the firewire port built-in, it should make it a lot easier for you too.

i feel like this video will get 1 million views really quick