Well some of you might be very familiar with this malarky, but i'm a newbert to the world of firmware hacks and thought it was rather cool.

My interest was peaked when myself and my housemates decided to start going to the gym together. Possibly due to my music degree I decided that I needed music whilst working out. I realised that my ipod is a 5G video model, which has a mini hard drive in so not exactly cut out for running with. I don't own any flash based MP3 devices except for a small USB player - 128mb isn't exactly enough for me!

I fished around for my ipod mini, wondering if that had flash or hard drive based storage. Annoyingly it's a hard drive in there. And I couldn't find my ipod - must have thrown it out when it broke. And then I discovered that the ipod mini is very easy to hack.

Not only can you put new firmware on it to snazz it up a little bit, but you can actually mod the hardware. Turns out they are compatible with some types of Compact Flash cards, all you have to do is take out the old hard drive and pop a CF card into the slot and you have a flash based ipod mini! Obviously it's a bit more complicated than that, but only with fiddly things rather than technical things. I've managed to acquire a 16GB CF card, new battery and an ipod mini for about £45 which is a damned slight cheaper than any other flash-memory based ipod.

I'll post up in this thread once they all arrive and show the results.

In the meantime my urge to tinker took over and I decided to do something with my ipod 5g video seeing as it was out of warranty. I found a firmware hack for the ipod called "Ipod touch comes to video ipod". Obviously I won't link to anything due to the legalities, but suffice to say if you copy and paste what's between those quote marks... ^_^

After quite a bit of tweaking to get v2.0 onto my ipod (v1.0 was finished fine, but they released all the resources for v2.0 without actually finishing the binary so you've got to do it manually) i've got it on and blimey it looks lovely. I wouldn't say it's a complete overhaul as the basic directory structure is still very much intact but it does look pretty awesome. I'll post some pics up when it's finished transferring all my music back onto it... I started typing this message with the intent of photoing my ipod but have only just realised that it's copying -.-

Anyone else hacked/modded an ipod?

Anyone want a tutorial on how to do it?

No experience of iPods myself, but IIRC some years ago it was cheaper to buy a Creative Labs MuVo mp3 player, rip out the microdrive and use it in compactflash slots than to buy a portable hard drive or flask drive of the same capacity!

I am in general fairly intersted in this kind of modding though (alternative/updated operating systems, frontends etc).

I jailbroke my 2G Ipod Touch.

I do know of Rockbox. They have made customised firmware for certain models of iPod that allow them to do more stuff. I haven't got any experience with it but I believe it was covered in PCpro a long time ago. I've also heard of iPod Linux. Just Googled it and TBH, it looks a bit rubbish. It'd be interesting to hear from people who had tried it though.

Righty:







Look good? =D

Very nice. It's a shame the standard GUI doesn't look that good.

Is that a G5 Powermac or a Mac Pro it's connected to?

It's a Powermac G5, i'm not really a mac user =)

Quite. A Powermac isn't a Mac at all.

Talking of iPod hacks, I hope nobody minds if I try and hijack this thread?

Has anyone here modified an old iPod charger/device to work with the new ones? iPhone 3G and new gen nanos (possibly the new gen classics too) don't charge through older cables.

Anyone modified a cable to work?? I've found a few nerdy conversations about it around the web, but I didn't understand any of it.

I've never tried modifying a charger - something quite daunting about the prospect of blowing myself/my ipod/my house/the world up.

And i'm not really a mac user, hence the age-old powermac that I picked up for a couple of hundred on fleabay! It's pretty much just there for garageband, itunes and iphoto. And potentially iweb.

Anyways, i've got a big grin on my face about the next screenshot... Below is my ipod mini, connected to itunes. Notice anything awesome about it? =p

Nope

Stock iPod minis only came in 4 and 6GB varieties?

2 and 4GB actually =)

Below are pics of a compact flash card in my ipod. I am muchly happy...




Edit - sorry about the size, forgot at first then they didn't resize on the forums so re-upping

Forum stretching images FTL.

Are you sure? TBH though, Wikipedia being wrong wouldn't surprise me lol. No wait, The Register reviewed the 6GB mini in 2005.


Still, nice mod. Great way to give an old iPod a new lease of life.

Ah, apologies, I was thinking of the first generation of ipod nano, you're totally correct.

For some reason the battery life has been extended considerably. You may expect this when moving from hard drive to flash, but consider that it had enough juice to run the thing for about 10 seconds from a full charge, and since installing the CF card it's been going 3 hours and only a fractional amount of battery has been used...

I think that's a result =p