Nook Color hacking update: Video

I have been using my Nook Color for over a month now, and I have still not settled on a specific ROM that I like.  When I first bought the NC, I went for the simple root which opened up the possibility for me to install Android market apps.  The problems that the stock rooted firmware presented, such as the ugly interface, led me to try using custom ROMs. First, I flashed a Froyo (2.2) ROM to an SD card and used that for some time.  Later I installed a Honeycomb (3.0) based ROM to my internal memory. I quit using Honeycomb because the interface was too laggy, and apps tended to crash often.  At that point I moved to Gingerbread (2.3) based ROM including Cyanogenmod, Ultimate Droid, and Phiremod.  All of these had their good and bad points.  Unfortunately, none of them could do video playback correctly.  YouTube either didn't work at all, or had unwatchable frame rates. 

One month later, I am back to the Froyo ROM.  It seemed to have a video player that actually worked.  Sadly, Froyo is also the most work to set up.  The Froyo ROM does not include the Android Market and other Google apps. Therefore, one must seperately download the Google apps pack and install them over USB to the nook.  However, android debug bridge over USB has never worked properly for me, making almost impossible to copy the Google apps pack to the proper location on the nook.

The solution to this problem was quite easy.  Instead of trying to copy all of the Google apps to the nook, I simply rebuilt the ROM to include them.  This may sound complicated, but it was a matter of unzipping the ROM, copying over a few folders, and rezipping it.  I didn't expect it to actually work, but it did.  I am pleased to say that video playback works quite nicely on this ROM.

You can watch my run through video of the NC running Froyo (Android 2.2) to get a better idea of what it actually looks like.  Note that although I do not discuss the actual book reading function for which Nook was intended, the functionality is still available with the Nook app through the Android Market. This probably won't be the last ROM I install on my Nook color, so I might end up making a video yet of the installation process for those who are interested in seeing this.