Using Philips GoGear on Fedora

[Suvayu Ali]

Hello all,

I just bought a Philips GoGear 8 Gb. I chose this mostly because it is 
free of DRM stuff. That is one of the things Philips emphasises on for 
the GoGear range of media players. To play my mp3's all I need to do is 
drag and drop them to the player which is mounted as a regular USB drive.

Everything is awesome except that the player can't read the tags 
although the manual says it supports both ID3v1 and v2. I use Picard to 
tag my mp3's and they show up just fine in rhythmbox. As for video, it 
needs to be converted to .smv (Simgatel mobile video, I think) before 
the player can play them. So I figured I might need to use something 
like opengear[1] or golb[2] (GoGear On Linux Boxes) to do the file 
transfers and video conversion, but these projects seem to have been 
abandoned. Moreover I wasn't able to compile the source code from the 
golb tarball as there was no configure script or makefile.

I have tried running the manufacturer provided software on wine, but 
that is a no go. Does anyone have any experience with these players?

Thanks in advance.

[1]http://opengogear.sarovar.org/
[2]http://golb.sourceforge.net/#download
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/golb/

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.