Putting Video in Your New Video iPod--How Fast Is It?

We reviewed our new iPod with video (video iPod) last Wednesday and posted its battery performance characteristics yesterday. The big deal of the new video iPod, of course, is video. There are 1000's of music videos available for $1.99 with the song from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). There are also six Pixar movie shorts and five TV shows, also $1.99 each. There are still only 24 free video podcasts, the same number as a week ago. Where are all the new video podcasts?

There's no problem putting the music videos, Pixar movies and TV episodes on the video iPod. Just buy and download them via iTunes to your Mac. Then update your iPod by plugging it in and they transfer automatically just like songs. But it is not so easy with the available video podcasts or the video files on your Mac or on your DVDs.

We downloaded several of the technology-related video podcasts from iTMS but they all ended up in iTunes as .mov files instead of .m4v files. They played fine in iTunes but would not transfer to our video iPod. The video iPod requires video files to be in H.264 or MPEG-4 formats at 320x240 pixels with an audio bit rate of 160 or less. We are sure that future video podcasts will be coded for the video iPod but they aren't now. You have to convert those .mov files to compatible .m4v files.

If you have iMovie HD, one can use it to convert .mov files to video iPod compatible .m4v files. The only problem is that it takes a long time, a very long time. On our 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 it took 6 minutes 11 seconds to import a 2 minute 37 second video podcast in .mov format and over 45 minutes to export it as a .m4v file--we actually quit after 9 minutes with iMovie telling us that 36 minutes and climbing remained.

QuickTime Pro 7.0.3 is easy to use and quite a bit faster but it costs $30 from Apple to convert QuickTime to QuickTime Pro. It took virtually no time to import the 2:37 video podcast and 8 minutes 40 seconds to export it as a video iPod compatible .m4v file with our PowerBook. Still, that's too slow for us. At 3.3X the length of the video, a 2-hour movie would take over 6.6 hours to encode on our PowerBook. Our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDR graphics card would be much faster but we are on travel and can't test it.

Then there's ffmpegX, a "free" open source application available for download here along with the two necessary binaries. If you use it much, its nice to pay the $15 contribution. ffmpegX is a bit complicated to set up and configure but not too difficult. The reward for a little effort is that it's much faster than QuickTime Pro, taking exactly 5 minutes to encode the same 2:37 .mov video podcast with our PowerBook--that's 1.9X.

If you want to rip a DVD you own and encode it for your video iPod, it may be legally questionable in some places at present. However, there is an application called HandBrake that does it--one can download it here. We don't have a DVD with us so we didn't try it.

In summary, the speed king for encoding .mov files for the video iPod as compatible .m4v or .mp4 files is ffmpegX. Ars Technica posted a simple guide on how to encode .m4v and .mp4 files for the video iPod using QuickTime Pro, ffmpegX and HandBrake for those who need it. [Bill Fox]