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Transferring Video to the 5G iPod
Now that I’ve finally got it up and running properly, I thought I’d explore the new (and definitely most hyped) feature on my new iPod. Video.
The ironic thing here is that I’ve owned a video player before, Digital Cube’s iStation i2. And the very reason I made the switch back to an iPod was that I found I didn’t have much use for a dedicated portable video device anymore, now that I no longer am doing as much travelling. I had wanted to go back to a music-only player, but got a little extra in this latest iPod incarnation.
Anyway, the greatest thing about the i2 was that it could play virtually any file that you threw at it. It played all the major codecs (xVid, DivX, MPG, AVI…) natively, making it a video pirates dream.
Copy-protection groups like the MPAA are very likely banging their heads trying to figure out how to fight these devices. There’s probably a very good reason these gadgets are currently only manufactured overseas.
The new iPod on the other hand, makes you re-encode all your content into an Apple-friendly format before you can play it. The new version of Quicktime does let you export your movies to iPod format, but the whole thing seems to lock up solid any time I’ve tried to export a file other than its own MOV files. And it costs $29.99.
So it’s been up to other manufacturers to rise to the challenge and launch their own competing encoding platforms. The easiest, and cheapest, out there is Videora’s iPod Converter. It’s free.
Videora is a company I’ve written about in the past, whose main product is a software package that scours the online P2P trading networks for the latest episodes of you favorite TV shows and downloads them automatically, basically turning your computer into a TIVO.
iPod converter is a very simple program that quickly lets you re-encode your video files into a more ‘pod-friendly format. As a test, I took the short video I made of our ride on Shanghai’s Maglev train and converted it for playback on my iPod.
I can happily report that iPod Converter worked quickly and effortlessly. In less than a few minutes, I had a working copy of my video that I could import into iTunes and transfer onto my iPod.I haven’t tried converting any of the other content Videora can find for you. But if it they all work as easily as my Shanghai home movie, the MPAA is going to have an even bigger headache on its hands.
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