[rapierdragon]

I just got a new 1" mp4 (ipod gen6 clone ?). Just bought off ebay, and it arrived off the mail truck last week (sept/2012).

It says it has 8 Gb storage. Doubt I'll ever use all of it. (I've got a nice old 3.7" mp4 that has an SD-card-slot which I use for vid-watching on the go).

Mainly I bought this 1" ch'ipod so I could clip it onto a watch-band and basically modify into custom LCD-display type watch. It would still have mp3/mp4 abilities... maybe a Star Trek TNG type LCARS display... but that's all unrelated to the main reason for this post.

I can't even start to hack the it cause no one anywhere has firmware support for series 11.

Data (as it shows from its menu):

2011/11/29
1.0.04
2011/12/02
as211a_v1003

and from easychip and chipgenius I get:

actions hs usb flashdisk
atj211x

As you can see, its one of these "relatively new" series 11 chips.

BUT THE ONLY INFO I CAN FIND on where the research is going is easily dated 2010 or so.

As you can imagine, it's now September 2012. Where are our updates? Did it turn out that the new chip setup completely prevents you from updating something like s1res to work with the new series 11?

-- my guess on the old system (v3~v9) vs new system (series 11)

I'm guessing the new format is quite different from the older versions. Originally you had only what, one chip to deal with? It had two sections to it, the firmware (the menu, graphics to display menu, battery-charge level graphic, etc), and the user-accessable storage area (for mp3/mp4/jpg/txt type files).

And the new setup must be almost like having two chips; one with firmware, one with storage and a compression algorithm; and the second chip has all the storage. That would explain why my mp4 has TWO dates listed for firmware.

Anything windows sends or receives probably basically goes to the first chip, gets compressed (or uncompressed) and then stored on the second chip. Guessing there's no direct access to the first chip (its been specifically built and coded to sit like an invisible piece of glass to the end-user. Only the manufacturer is supposed to know how to access it.)

Even if its still mainly one chip, it acts like two chips. Windows XP/Vista shows the device as being hacked to show 8 GB storage, but then if you format it it'll show only 2 GB ... cause basically the "hidden chip" acts like a tiny 7-zip (or winrar/winzip) type program (from our point of view).

So okay, maybe in reality the new series 11 doesn't really work that way, but I'm just trying to give an easy-to-understand basic-picture type explanation. It would also explain why so many ppl have "delay" issues with load-times and "crash/stall" issues with larger files... cause the file needs to decompress to play, basically get unzipped and temporarily-stored in the free space. (Would explain why a 30-second video plays fine, but the moment you try to save or load a 1+ gig video to the supoosed 8 gig storage the device has problems... its kind of like the old "not enough free RAM" issues we had back in the old 386/486 cpu days.)

Flash memory isn't the same as RAM memory. It won't matter if your mp4 has 16 gig of flash storage if its only got a tiny 640 mb of ram (exagerating here, but you get the idea. Would be a bit like trying to read the data off a DVD with only your own eyes instead of using a DVD-player to decompress/decode it and TV to display it).

-- oops, sorry ---

Lol, didn't mean to go on so long. Sometimes I just get a great idea and it comes out in that "sounds a bit like a rant" effect when I try to explain it.

Anyways ... updates?