issues with iPod on SUSE 10.2
 

I received a new 30gb iPod Video recently. I went to sync it with Helix Banshee on 10.1, only to find out that Banshee doesn't recognize the ipod. So I installed a new Banshee, lost all ability to play MP3s, but it synced OK.

I installed 10.2, and I figured that the HelixBanshee not recognizing the iPod bug was fixed. It wasn't. I didn't feel like looseing the ability to play my MP3s, so I installed gtkpod. It synced my songs great.
But I wanted to put video on the thing, and I couldn't find a way to do that on Linux. So I went to another PC I have with WinXP and iTunes. And despite the fact I told it not to autoupdate and delete my songs, when I moved the video onto the iPod tab, it updated it, and deleted all music files off my iPod! So I hooked it back up to the SUSE machine, and used gtkpod to put my music on there. But then, I went to make sure everything on my iPod was OK, and it had the filenames of all my music, it would play, but no tags, no album art, no information. I went to check on my video, and in the Video area, it had all my music listed there too! My video wouldn't play either.

I love Linux and I like using my iPod, but I have never actually hated Linux as much as I do now! What's going on? Is there a program that will sync everything (Music, video, photos, podcasts), make playlists and do it right on Linux. Help please!

I've used Linux full time since 2003, and I have never been as frustrated with it as I am now!

In order for videos to play on an iPod video, they must me MPEG-4 or h.264. No exceptions.

In order to play h.264, you need a video player that uses the x264 codec, i.e. MPlayer or VLC. You will also need the required packages, such as ffmpeg. Best way to get them is to include a packman rpm repository into yast and install either VLC, MPlayer, or xine1 (xine1 replaces the xine already on the system with a version that has many more options, like DVD playback).

I'm using openSUSE 10.2 and have installed Helix Banshee 0.11.2 package that comes with the distro.

I'm trying to sync my iPod (Video 30GB) music library but Banshee doesn't shows/detects my ipod. I'm able to view my ipod in the GNome Nautilus file browser though.

I read about the IPod Raid bug and downloaded ipod-debug-dump.sh from Banshee's website. But when I execute the script, I get few lines of info and a warning at the end - "This iPod suffers from the volume.fsusage=raid bug. As such, it cannot be used in Banshee.... "

Now when I go through the entire info, I see the following values for volume.fsusage

volume.fsusage = 'filesystem' (string)
volume.fsusage = '' (string)

I find the above values and the warning at the end quite contradictory.

So how do I get my ipod to work with Banshee? My iPod has the following values as per ipod-debug-dump.sh output.

Device Info
Model Number: MA002
Device Model: Video (White)
iPod Generation: Fifth (5)
Adv. Capacity: 30 GB
Is New: YES
Writable: YES
Firmware Version: 6.1.2


Please help.

thanks & regards,
mahantya

You can get an account with apple .com and then purchase music for yoru ipod, off course that is not the cool way to go about it!
Anna:)