The iPhone was designed specifically to work with Apple iTunes, and to the best of my knowledge, you still can’t get away without attaching it to iTunes to activate it, but after the dirty business of activating and jailbreaking, many of us want to return to a world free of DRM and big brother.

There are several tools available to people using iPhone (or iPod) with Linux, but or some reason I haven’t been able to find one page that has a good list; I’m going to try to set that up here.

Music Management

• Amarok is fairly easy to set up with instructions by Arnold Daniels
• GTKpod looks good, but I haven’t used it much; here’s a guide.

Media Conversion Tools

• ffmpeg: ffmpeg is probably the single most important utility for encoding audio and video into a format that can be transferred to the iPhone. The trick is, you will probably have to build from source to enable the correct (proprietary) codecs. Even better – install the version of ffmpeg from medibuntu; here are instructions
• myth2ipod: myth2ipod converts your pvr recordings to a feed that can be downloaded to your ipod. At this point I have only had success with this on iTunes, but I do know that you can add feeds in amarok, but I haven’t done well with video feeds. I actually have myth2ipod set up on Knoppmyth which runs VERY nice!

Libraries and Codecs

• libgpod: A library designed to allow access to the ipod by developers of GTKpod.
• fuse: a framework to allow sshfs to work, fuse = Filesystem in USErspace.
• MP4box: ?? don’t know .. it exists, but i haven’t looked at it yet.
• nuvexport: a component of myth2ipod.. not sure of its role… i think it generates XML…

Mounting the file system

• sshfs: This is a neat utility to access a file system over ssh. People who are new to iphone on Linux may not realize that the primary mode of access is over wifi rather than usb.

Tutorials

•  Howto: Encode H.264 Video for the iPod using ffmpeg

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