supagold

I figure that in theory you should be able to use the Ratco CF USB host adapter to run the iPod as an external drive. Has anyone ever tried this? Usually the iPod is getting charged when connected, but if it can run off of it's internal battery, this could be an elegant solution. It'd certainly be the best of both worlds for me; music off of the iPod, which can also serve up video for my u50v.

EDIT: Changing my search terms gave me more hits, revealing that other people have thought of this, but no one has posted whether it actually works.

psionandy

Originally Posted by supagold

I figure that in theory you should be able to use the Ratco CF USB host adapter to run the iPod as an external drive. Has anyone ever tried this? Usually the iPod is getting charged when connected, but if it can run off of it's internal battery, this could be an elegant solution. It'd certainly be the best of both worlds for me; music off of the iPod, which can also serve up video for my u50v. EDIT: Changing my search terms gave me more hits, revealing that other people have thought of this, but no one has posted whether it actually works.

If you want to donate the Ratco and the IPOD i'll try it for you

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BooDa

It works, but the transfer rate is VERY slow - movies were unwatchable due to frequent buffering. (I didn't try any movies with a bitrate lower than 700kpbs, though, so YMMV.) It will also drain your iPod battery really fast since it keeps the hard drive spinning much more than normal usage does.

It's a cool idea but less than practical in my experience. Here's hoping that all next-gen PDAs have USB host builtin . . .

supagold

BooDa: Thanks for the reply. Did you try using the microdrive option in betaplayer? If so, did it make any difference to either battery life or buffering?

EDIT: Nevermind. I misunderstood exactly how microdrive mode works. I found a post by Picard in the Betaplayer forums where he indicates that all microdrive mode is really doing is stopping the drive after it fills its buffer, but it looks like we don't have enough throughput to fill it in the first place. It's too bad, because on Ratco's site they claim that they got 1.6Mbps using an iPaq.