How Long Does It Take a 2GB Eclipse MP3 Player to Charge?

We need to know the MODEL of the player (2GB is not enough), because the more "complex" the player type is- the more enrgy it takes: The most energy consuming will be a touch screen mp4, second to it will be a NON touch screen mp4, and the most low energy user will be the simplest mp3 player (only music). An hour and a half of video for a generic touch screen mp4 sound about right (are you asking about video? if you are asking about music playing- according to their website it should be 8 hours, might be a bit less). P.S- you can leave it a while longer charging- today's electronics can handle it (just to be sure it is fully charged). If it is a touch screen - it needs more, 1 hour sound less then it should. And make sure the usb cable (wall chrger) are working fine.

1. Why do TV news cameras people carry around gigantic shoulder mounted cameras when there are so many smaller options?

Smaller options for what? There are several factors involved. One is durability, rugged construction, They have to have the potential to function around the clock in all kinds of weather. The most critical factor is the quality of the images. Modern video cameras (not a video camera stuck in a phone or still camera) has to produce the best possible image. This translates into large sensors with the ability to shoot in raw format. The nearest equivalent still camera that comes to mind is a Hasselblad with a 2 1/4 inch sensor and is large even without the additional components needed for video. The images shot for the news must produce images that show well on large high resolution screens. Picture quality has a high impact on viewer loyalty. Then there is also the audio to consider which has to be part of the package. If a smaller cheaper camera would work, it would be used. There are no smaller cameras of equal functionality available

2. X server, keyboard & mouse lockup with corrupted display

By the way: alt-sysrq-[rk] wo not help here - it actually kills all the programs itself and putting you in that console scenario. However, that is not the problem. In a nutshell, it's nouveau.From what you are saying, the X server is still functioning but the graphics "connection" appear to be cut off from your display.Since a nouveau driver is for NVIDIA cards, java, firefox and your other programs are trying to utilize the card thinking it's available. This is called video (aka. hardware) acceleration. The screen "lockup" is not from the X server then, it's from the lack of hardware capabilities in nouveau for your card (3D rendering, video decoding, etc.), so when a program attempts to use one of them, it crashes nouveau.Consider the GPU code names and video engines for NVIDIA cards. Assuming you have a GeForce 6/7 series card, it ends up in the NV40 (Curie) family, which in turn use VPE1, VPE2 and VP1 video engines, none of which supports video (hardware) acceleration (except for XvMC from VPE2). That is what is making your X server "fail". (Be warned, the proprietary NVIDIA driver will not help in this case because of the missing capabilities. )The solution is to disable hardware acceleration entirely, and just stick to software rendering until you get a supported card. In java 8, you can do this: java -Dprism.order=sw -jar my.jar, works fine on my system. And firefox has an option in its advanced preferences to enable hardware acceleration (if it's available, which mistakenly is but I do not know why), make sure that's unchecked. Update: nouveau was never good at utilizing NVIDIA hardware in the first place, so if you are using one and your distro (e.g. RHEL 7) makes it difficult to get proprietary drivers I recommend you replace the card with a Radeon/Intel whose open-source drivers are better supported

3. Playing Video on TV from Ipod?

definitely the cable you are using will not play video to your tv from your 160gb ipod. the new 160gb ipod classic does not support the old audio-video cable from the old ipod video. you need to purchase the new pin-type audio-video component/composite cable (not the headphone jack audio-video cable).