Thread: geekmaster kindle video player
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Old 05-16-2016, 05:23 PM   #350
geekmaster
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Multiverse 6627A
Device: K1 to PW3
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by geekmaster View Post
As you may know, amazon is now selling a "USB sound dongle" for under $20, which currently supports only the newest kindles, but they have announced plans to support older kindles as well (or you can DIY).
I am curious whether you have a source for the statement highlighted above.

As far as I know the Kindle Audio Adapter is only "officially" supported on the 7th gen Paperwhite. Although it has been found to also work on the Voyage and Oasis I haven't yet seen any statement of support from Amazon for those devices. And the only mention of older devices I have come across is a statement from Peter Korn of Amazon that older devices would NOT support the adapter because they lack sufficient RAM to run Amazon's VoiceView TTS software. (At 23:00 of this interview, "...unfortunately we won't be able to bring this to previous generations.")
That "not enough RAM" sounds like totally bogus politi-speak. Even the K2 supports Text-To-Speech:



Regarding where *I* heard about plans to support older kindles, that is currently in active discussion right here at MobileRead (where it is claimed to have been tested and is working on a PW2):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...67#post3317667

As discussed in MobileRead threads on this subject, the (alleged) amazon-imposed per-device limitations appear to be a marketing decision, not technical. And we can get past their bogus anti-consumer "official" limitations with a jailbreak anyway, right?

But beyond problems with license distrubution for text-to-speech files, an official amazon USB sound device can be used for non-TTS things too (such as multimedia sound, movie sound-tracks, music, and your kindle waking up and shouting profanities in the middle of the night when it receives an unwanted OTA update)...

Regarding RAM consumption, I had (phoneme-based) text-to-speech on my Apple-II, and it had only 24KB (kilobytes, a THOUSAND times smaller than a megabyte) of RAM. So yeah, claims from some amazon/lab126 lackey, bogus, B-O-G-U-S. Period...

And for that matter, I am pretty sure my ancient "Speak-And-Spell" had a LOT less memory than my Apple-II. And if you think "Speak-And-Spell"-quality speech is obsolete, just tell that to Stephen Hawking.
Last edited by geekmaster; 05-16-2016 at 06:35 PM.
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