probable main causes of chipod problems
 

I just thought I would share some of my speculations, based on my observations and experience as an owner of several Chinese made pmp devices, as to the probable reasons why many people get a very negative opinion about cheap chinese portable media players.
The most common complaint it would seem is that the device just stops working after a few months. Very often, the owner does not mention whether or not the usb cable was checked by swapping with a known good one.It is quite possible that the usb charger cable simply goes defective, the player can no longer be charged, and the unit dies when the battery is completely discharged.
With both of the chinese mp4 players I have, the usb cable failed after a very short time.Changing the cable solved the problem in both cases.The symptoms of a defective cable seem suspiciously similar to those described by people complaining that their player may have a major problem (not properly detected when connected to the computer, when connection is made it is intermittent, and file transfers can be corrupted etc).Is it possible that the majority of mp4 player complaints can be due merely to a flaky cable?It seems unlikely that the firmware would spontaneously become corrupted, and I have never seen a major hardware fault occur just out of the blue with these devices.
It is unfortunate, but a lot of otherwise good chinese media players get a bad name because the manufacturers in order to save a few pennies include very cheap low quality and often defective essential accessories (USB cable, charger, earphones etc)

NAND flash only has several years guaranteed retention. It is easy to corrupt the firmware if formatted improperly since it shares the space with U disk partition.

I am really referring to problems that appear within a few months of use.A lot of users are not very tech savvy, and often a problem with a simple cause like a defective USB cable could be attributed to a fault in the player itself.
Also, on the CD I got with the CamFlix player, there is a utility called FlashDiskManager, which I presume is a tool specifically for formatting the player.However, this tool can't be used because even if the device is connected, all I see is the error message disk not found. I will not even attempt to format the device with windows, as I suspect that that could be a fatal mistake!
I have located and posted firmware for players with board id sd036-main-v12, which is the board id of my camflix player.With regards to rk2608 players according to the info here, there is no extraction tool for players with this chipset.However, on mp4 nation, someone posted that the older 2608 rockchip players are easy to access in order to backup the firmware and mod the device, but he did not detail any method and I could find no further info on this.Does anyone have any further leads on this? Sorry for going slightly off topic, but I just wanted to cover everything in one message.;)

The cable maybe the problem as well as the battery itself. I just bought one Chinese MP4 player. Today I charged the battery for the first time it swelled a lot. I think I have to get a new battery and luckily it's Nokia compatible. I may want to buy two batteries with one external charger.