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iPod Conversion Tools

The iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch have all revolutionised how we interact with media. This could be with music or photo's. But more and more it is allowing us freedom to transport and watch video on the move.

(Image courtesy if Wikimedia. Used under a CC Attribution/Sharealike license)

"Video on the move": It sounds great, doesn't it? Copy your movie of choice onto that little box of electronics, stick the headphones in and watch it anywhere and it any time.

The truth is slightly less glamorous.

If you've read through some of the tutorial pages on this site you will know that video takes up a HUGE amount of space on your disk. The only way to succesfully capture and transport this amount of data is to compress your video. We all know what happens with compressed video, right? - It starts to loose quality.

This is something that the iPod generation won't stand for. Youtube used to be the poster boy for low quality user generated input but even now it's going HD (High Definition) and is starting to loose some of that 'low quality' reputation.

So why should the iPod be any different?

Well it isn't. The iPod has managed to find a way of compressing video and retaining as much quality as possible. TThis is done in a couple of ways.

1) The screen size is a lot smaller than a TV
If you are taking something meant to display on a large HD style television set it will need a large amount of bandwidth to process (and therefore decode) the video signal. It will also need a large amount of detail in the signal to be decoded. But if you are only decoding and containing enough detail to display on a screen that is a few inches across this will obviously mean the information you need to store is less.

2) Use of innovative codecs.
Apple generally use the H264 codec which has an extremely efficient compression algorithm. This means quality can be retained while still having small file sizes.

So all you need to do is take your source video, compress it using H264 and make it the size of an iPod screen right?

Wrong!

It's quite a bit more complicated than that. The output format is specific for one thing, and there are probably other reasons that it's best not to get into. So I won't

So how do you convert your video to play on an Apple player?

Easy: Use a free iPod convertor. Here are 2 to look at:

For Windows

iPodME

iPod Media Encoder converts video into an iPod-compatible format, the easy way. It is a very simple, small (4mb) executable that needs no install and works in the background.

- based on ffmpeg
- really easy to use and straighforward
- easy batch encoding, just select multiple files by clicking on the “add files” button or drag’n drop them into the list
- you can add new files to the batch during encoding
- run in background without disturbing your work (with the defaut priority option)
- 6 profiles adapted to most usage : 3 encoding speed, each optimized for file size or video quality
- possibility to customize the encoding options
- support soft-subtitles, and multiple subtitles per video
- support multiple CPU cores automatically
- can shutdown your computer after encoding

You must have the .NET framework (2.o or later) installed to run this software. The link for that is available from the iPodME web site.

Click here to go to the iPodME website

For the Macintosh

iSquint

Unfortunately this tool is not longer supported or being developed by it's creater. However it is still a cracking little piece of software.

From the website:

iSquint is an iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X. It's many times faster than QuickTime Pro, works with almost all popular video formats, and it's infinitely free-er. It's also really easy. Just drag in your file, and click Start. You can also choose "TV" or "iPod" size, set your quality, or even go all-out by playing in the Advanced drawer.

On a 1GHz G4, iSquint can convert most video files to iPod-screen-sized videos in realtime. Intel Macs are up to twice as fast, and can convert videos upwards of 5x realtime! Depending on a few factors, a 20 minute video will take up anywhere from 50-150MB of disk space.

I like the look of this tool. It accepts mutliple input formats, works in batch, doesn't need Quick time pro or DivX codecs to work, and it's quick.

Try it and see what you think.

Click here to go to the iSquint web page
Click here to Download the software directly

Click here to return from iPod Conversion tools to the home page

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