iPod MP4 Convertion

Back of My iPod by clarkalastair on Zooomr

Over the past day or two I’ve been encoding videos from an avi (DivX/Xvid) format to MP4 for my iPod and PSP Slim + Lite. This has been one of my major issues of running as my main portable media device.

iTunes doesn’t easily support getting DVDs, DivX/Xvid or other popular formats onto your iPod. This I understand is a marketing technique to get people to buy from the iTunes store. However I feel this doesn’t fit well with Apple’s whole design style of ease of use and simplicity. It’s especially annoying to those who buy real DVDs and want to have them available on their lovely box of tricks.

If I want to get a DVD (let’s assume a 90 minute film) onto my iPod, I must use a 2 step process, decrypt the DVD onto my hard disk and then encode it for my iPod. Decrypting the DVD is potentially illegal, and the software that is available to do this has had all development suspended due to threat of RIAA legal action.

To encode the decrypted files (which are usually around 4-5GB) for use on your iPod you must either shell money out for a registered version of Quicktime and even more for the DVD mpeg decoder. There’s an opensource solution using FFMPEG via the commandline, but the interface isn’t very pretty or user friendly for the uninitiated. An alternative is Videora, which I’ve been happyily using for a while.

This is fine, if all you want is to get the damn thing onto your iPod. If your aim is backup as well, then this is not for you. The pixel size that you will use for the ipod is too small to be worthy of watching on anything larger.

A good solution for backup is to use the value-for-money DivX converter. This codec has been among the piraters choice for some time and has a good trade off between file size, quality and conversion time. It has a dead simple user interface and you can hardly fail to go wrong with it using the normal settings.

Getting back to the issue in hand is that once you have the DivX file, you still need to convert it for your iPod. Using the original DVD extraction has advantages in quality, but you loose out in speed of conversion as there’s more data to read. It also stresses your computer as a result of more hard disk accesses and longer running times generating heat on the processor.

Converting from the DivX file you suffer from double conversion syndrome. Encoding formats work by ditching bits that aren’t as important for your eyes, for example loosing some sharpness and loosing some accuracy in the colours. If you convert one format to another as they work differently, you loose some areas in the first conversion and then different areas in the second.

Saying all that, the chances are that you won’t see the difference on such a small screen. But why does it have to be so complicated? Apple, why can’t you and the DVD encryption folks work something out that lets it be a one click process…”Import!” just like CDs? Because frankly at the moment it’s a right pain.

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4. Hard Disks and Files
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