Getting video onto your iPod

Introduction

[Editor's note: In what follows we'll be taking you through the task of encoding video for consumption on the (video) iPod. Some of our examples will include preparing video from a DVD. Some but not all DVDs are protected by CSS, an anti-piracy scheme that uses encryption to protect the disc's contents. In some countries, like the United States, you could be in violation of the US Code (chapter 17, section 1201) by "ripping your discs," although legal experts have expressed doubt about whether or not fair use rights trump this code (the infamous DMCA, as it is known). If you choose to rip DVDs and live in an area where this is legal, you incur your own risk.  More importantly, you should contact your representatives and tell them that the DMCA is garbage, and back the DMCRA.]

The release of a video-capable iPod has opened up a world of possibilities for people upgrading to the newest model. While some people might have experience with encoding video for portable devices with strict format requirements like the PSP, most new iPod owners will be getting their first taste of this in the upcoming months.

Both the PSP and iPod can both only play H.264/MPEG-4 encoded videos with AAC audio tracks and not much else. Within that, there are limits to the resolution and bit rate of the video files you can use on each device. The iPod's tech specs page states:

H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320x240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats.

MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480x480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

The most important bits to notice are that for playing video directly on your iPod, you're limited to a resolution of 320x240 @ 768 Kbps on H.264 and 480x480 @ 2.5Mbps, and an AAC audio bit rate up to 160 Kbps @ 48 Khz. That might be gobbledegook to many iPod-toting individuals, so I've sought to keep parts of this article simple. Hopefully the least experienced person can take DVDs and videos from his computer and put them directly onto his iPod. If you know what adaptive quantizers are, then you can probably read the above specifications and just go encode video via your usual routine.

In this guide I'm going to show you how you can take various video sources like DVDs and video clips and encode them so that they're playable on your new iPod. I'm going to attempt to do this for the two platforms with iTunes support: Mac OS X and Windows XP. On both platforms there are easy and hard ways to go about this, and I'll do my best to illustrate both without falling into the traps of vagueness and technobabble that some guides fall into.

As you might've guessed, the "easy" procedures usually give you less fine-grained control over the final output of your video file, but with a corresponding increase in your sanity and free time. The "hard" routes usually involve several different programs and a lot of choices that can seem confusing if you've never encoded video before. My philosophy is to just go the easy route unless you really, really need that extra bit of control. In our situation—putting videos onto a very tiny screen—performing two-pass encoding and fine tuning every aspect of the encoder is overkill.

With all of that out of the way, lets get into the meat of this article, converting your videos for use on your new iPod!

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