Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I know the entries haven’t exactly been spilling out lately. Chock that up to parenthood I guess, which tends to take up most of the free time at home I used to devote to blogging, and the time that is left over is just an opportunity to catch up on sleep!

However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio. First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I’ve listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening. Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it’s hard to start reading history books when there’s lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn’t listening to books at that point, and didn’t want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer. There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible. I thought I’d spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books. It’s odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven’t read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn’t feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible. But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be “out of touch.” Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May. I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships. I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I’d ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book “credit” cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible’s Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay. Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There’s some fine print at the bottom which says “Offer valid for new Audible customers only.” Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account. Yes you can do this. Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want. I don’t think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts. The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can’t. Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts. You can’t activate more than two accounts on a given player. I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose. In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn’t read and really wanted to. So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn’t enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits. What do I do with those credits? So far, the only ones I’ve used were for a podcast! Well, that’s what Audible calls them anyway. They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address. Unfortunately, as I’ve found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod. Yes, I still speed things up! Although I do this via the iPod’s built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier. I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine. Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible. Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books. Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times! So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account! I can’t escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn’t done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that’s fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn’t have the confidence that these were books worth listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I’ve also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me. But I’ve also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?
The point of this is that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I’d start posting them here as well, since I’m not posting much else these days! So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5^th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.

Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.

For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC’s.

For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!

While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.

Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.

While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that’s currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.

Another key new feature is the Treo 700P’s ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it’s large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave’s myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S’s in a large list of songs my just hitting the ’s’ key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s’s. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP.

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people’s ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that’s not visible to you, it’s easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.

When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.

I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.

For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo’s, it’s going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don’t watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm’s next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!

According to Think Secret:

Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display.advertisementThis video iPod, which has been in development and on the table since before Apple released the 5G iPod last year with video playback, will feature a display that will occupy the entire front face of the device. Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed.

Wow, it looks like the Video iPod that we’ve all been waiting for may actually be coming out within the next month or two. A true widescreen aspect ratio will make this much more suited to viewing movies, and the screen expansion will be very welcome. I may have to take up a collection to upgrade because I’m sure as soon as this thing comes out, my 60GB 5G will sink in price and whatever money I get for it on eBay won’t nearly enough to cover the new one.

There are a bunch of mockups of what this new iPod will look like. Here’s one of my favorites (from Rainy Day Magazine):

It seems like everyone and his brother received an iPod for Christmas this holiday season. For the last month, my blog has gotten almost double the number of hits it usually gets, and I’m almost positive this is because of the two articles I wrote (here and here) about the Video iPod. Those articles are long and somewhat technical at times, so for new Video iPod owners they might be a little overwhelming.

Because Apple wasn’t sure how well their new video features would go over, they didn’t put a whole lot of effort into making it easy for people to learn how to put videos on their new toys. They also started with so few titles in their own store, that most people would naturally be quickly seeking ways of getting additional content from elsewhere. Really, all Apple was telling people was to buy an additional piece of software called QuickTime Pro. This has changed recently, but it can still be confusing for new iPod owners who expect to be able to just go home and click on the “put DVD movie on iPod” button. Of course there is no such button and you still can’t do this sort of thing with the ease that you can add a music CD’s to your iPod.

This all gave me the idea to compose yet another article about the Video iPod, but this one would be geared more towards people who were new to the iPod, to the world of digital video, or to both. You may even have some technical expertise, but this article should hopefully at least give you a real run down on what kind of options you have for getting video on your iPod.

I urge you to also read some additionl material that will really reduce your frustrations with your new iPod. Because Apple has a reputation for making things as easy as possible, they often don’t put information about how to do things they deem too “advanced” into the paltry manual that’s included with their product. While this is good for our trees, and perhaps a fair decision considering a lot of people won’t read manuals anyway, it often means that when people do want to do things that aren’t quite basic, they get lost. Well, luckily, there are plenty of places where you can get information online, so I thought I’d mention just a few.

Ilounge.com: this is a great place for information about iPods, an incredibly extensive collection of iPod accessory reviews, and a very active forum of users, some of whom are very knowledgeable (much more than me!) and are very willing to help those new to the iPod.

Apple iPod Yahoo! Group: If you’re more comfortable with an email list than a bulletin board, than the Apple iPod Yahoo! Group has some great information and users willing to help (including myself). One of the resident experts is a guy named Kirk McElhearn, who’s written a number of computer books, including a bunch on the Mac and the iPod.

Apple: Apple has a great support site for the iPod with answers to frequently asked questions, forums, and a special area called iPod 101 which has some great tutorials for beginners which go into a lot more detail then their manual.

But lets get back to Video, shall we? Where to begin? Probably the thing that comes to mind before even thinking about the iPod itself should be “what kind of video am I going to put on my iPod and where will I get it?” It’s a very basic first question that probably most of us don’t think about because we already have a specific source of video in mind. Even so, many people may also be unaware of some other kinds of video that may prove as valuable as the one they did have in mind! There are at least four major places to look for video that I can think of:

Where to Get Video

1. DVD’s: the source probably most people think of first is that of their own DVD library. You can’t simply tell iTunes to take your DVD and put it on your iPod. You need additional pieces (or piece) of software.
2. Home Video: probably the second most obvious source is video that you’ve shot yourself via a camcorder. You will probably need to convert this into a format that’s compatible with the iPod.
3. Online: Not quite as obvious is video you might find on the Internet. Ok, one of these is very obvious (iTunes), but the rest may not be:
   1. iTunes: the iTunes Music Store (which you can get to only through the iTunes program that came with your iPod) has a growing collection of TV shows ranging from really old ones to currently running ones, all selling at $2 a pop. It even has some free videos - short clips from Saturday Night Live, previews, short featurettes akin to what you might see on a DVD, etc. So far, there are no feature-length movies, but I have no doubt that these will come at some point. None of the iTunes video content require any real additional work other than making the purchase transaction and waiting as your file gets downloaded to your computer.
   2. File Sharing: there are certainly ways you can download copyrighted material illegally off the Internet. The entertainment industry, as it’s done before, is bungling yet another paradigm shift to online media. The can’t think creatively about how to work with this new world, but instead want to impose their old rules which just don’t work here. Eventually they will catch up, but in the mean time, they are forcing many people to illegally download material because they aren’t providing a legal (or affordable) way to get it legally. While we can all disagree on what should and shouldn’t be legal, I’m not going to suggest that you do anything that is obviously not legal, like downloading a movie that you’ve never paid for legally, and which you could easily do by buying the DVD or even renting it.
   3. Free Stuff: Why limit yourself (and put yourself in legal jeopardy) by downloading illegal material when there’s plenty of perfectly legal stuff out there? This massive amount of free video can be found primarily as:
      1. Video Podcasts: if you haven’t heard of “podcasts” you may have been living under a rock for the last year. Podcasts started out as just audio, but now come in video as well. They are basically just audio or video files that are hosted online for people to download. However, they usually are not just isolated single files, but an ongoing “show” that comes out at some regular interval and which you can, with the help of software like iTunes, subscribe to so that they are automatically downloaded and then transferred to your iPod whenever you plug it in. This makes the process of getting new episodes to watch something that doesn’t require any additional work after the initial setup. As I said, iTunes lets you subscribe to podcasts (just choose the “Podcasts” genre within the iTunes Music Store), and there are a bunch of other podcast applications out there as well. While not all of these video podcasts will play on an iPod without conversion, I think more and more are being offered in iPod-compatible formats.
      2. Public Domain: this content includes old movies and TV shows which have gone into the public domain mainly due to their copyright having run out, although some may have simply been offered to the public domain to start with or as a gift to the public way before the copyright would have expired. You can download these from the site Archive.org. There may be other online sources, but Archive.org is definitely the biggest.
      3. And More: there are still other sources of free content which aren’t podcasts and also aren’t on Archive.org. These include Google Video (here’s Google’s instructions on downloading video for your iPod) , and various other sources. There are at least a couple of websites that provide an ongoing list of new sources of video specifically made for the iPod which are very helpful: freeipodvideos.org and podguide.tv.
4. TiVo: yes, you can take the programs that you’ve recorded on your TiVo and transfer them to your iPod. Currently this isn’t supported by TiVo, although they have stated that they are planning to offer this functionality soon. In the mean time, there’s a third-party application that claims to do this from TVHarmony.com. I tried it, but it seemed to go so slowly that it would have taken many, many hours to convert just a 30-minute video, so something must have been wrong. Whether you use this or an upcoming TiVo product, you still have to get your video from your TiVo box to your computer, and that can sometimes be a slow process depending on what kind of setup you have. If you have a different DVR than a TiVo, in particular one made by a Cable or Satellite provider, chances are you won’t be able to convert video programs on it to your iPod. This may change, but for now you can’t do it as far as I know. Some of these companies have stated that they will be creating the ability to put the video on a portable device, but that device is not the iPod.

Adding Video to your iPod

Ok, so you’ve gotten your video that hopefully is in iPod-compatible format (if not we’ll deal with that later), but now it’s still just on your computer, you need to actually get it onto your iPod. While this is an easy task for anyone who’s owned an iPod before, for new iPod owners it may not be. If you buy videos (or download some of the free ones) off of the iTunes Music Store, then you don’t really need to worry - they are automatically added to your iTunes library and transferred to your iPod the next time you connect it to your computer. The same should hold true if you subscribe to a video podcast via iTunes.

If you’ve gotten a video from somewhere else, though, you will need to add it to your iTunes library. First, open iTunes if its not already open. Then in the File menu, choose “Add File to Library.” This will open up a dialog box that will let you browse through your computer’s file system so that you can locate that video file. Once you find it, select it and hit the Open button, and the file should then appear in your iTunes library.

There are a couple ways to look at your videos. One is via the “Videos” area in the “source” menu on the upper right:

If you don’t see such a menu item, than you may have it turned off in iTunes. To make it visible, Choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click on the “General” tab, which is the first, leftmost tab on the window that comes up, and make sure there’s a checkmark next to “Videos”:

Clicking on the “Videos” in the Source menu brings up a special page with a black background and thumbnail images representing the first second in each of the video clips, their title, and their duration (see screen capture above). Unfortunately, when iTunes displays this page, it needs to look inside each video clip to grab that thumbnail, and so it can take some time, especially if your computer isn’t the fastest and/or you have more than a handful of videos. Personally, I like to use the regular iTunes Library listing. You can see a lot more information, like when the video was added to your library, a rating if you’ve made one for it, comments, etc. However, if you have a ton of music on your iPod, you may not see the video file that you’ve just added right away in your library, let alone others that you’ve added before. A good way to filter your library to only show videos is by activating the search bar in iTunes. You do this by selecting “Show Search Bar” in the edit menu. If you only see the option “Hide Search Bar” that means the search bar is already visible. Here’s what it looks like:

Just click on the “Videos” and you will only see the videos in your library – this is a good way to keep track of these files if you have hundreds or thousands of music or audio book files on your iPod and don’t want to keep scrolling through these to find your videos.

Once these files are listed in your iTunes library, they will be transferred the next time you plug in your iPod. However, if the video isn’t compatible, you will get a warning from iTunes when it’s transferring to the iPod, which brings us to our next subject:

Video Compatibility

The iPod can’t simply play any old video file. Just as you can’t play a tape in a CD player, there are different file “formats” for video, and not all are compatible with the iPod. The iPod will only play a couple of different types of video file formats. They are both types of the file format known as MPEG4. One is called H.264 (also known as “AVC” or “Part 10″), and the other is sometimes just called “MPEG4,” but to be more exact should be called “MPEG4 Simple Profile” or just “MPEG4 SP.” If you look at the actual file, you might see a file extension (a few letters/numbers after the main file name) of “.AVI” or “WMV” or “.MP4″ or “.M4V” or “.MOV.” Only the last three are possibly (but not always) compatible with the iPod. Even if the file is in H.264 or MPEG4 SP, it won’t necessarily play on the iPod. There are some other settings within the video file that may not allow for this.

So how do you deal with this issue of compatibility? First of all, you can avoid it completely by using video content that has been made specifically for the iPod, downloaded from the iPod Music Store, and other places online. If you can’t find video that is already in iPod Format, however, you can actually convert it, which can be easy or hard depending on the tool you use, and perhaps a bit of luck. In order to convert video into an iPod-compatible format from a non-compatible one, you need to use at least one of a number of different programs:

Converting Video

Video clips are a bit more straightforward than convernting DVD’s, so lets go over these first. There are a few free options as well as many that will cost you, but usually not a very large sum.

Free Options
iTunes	This is a very new option as of this writing. Just last week, Apple came out with a new version of the free iTunes program (version 6.0.2), that I believe uses the same conversion engine that’s in their $30 QuickTime Pro application.Pros: it’s free, it’s integrated into iTunes so you don’t have to run a separate program, and it’s very simple – you just add the video file to your iTunes library, then choose “Convert Selection For iPod” in the Advanced menu.Cons: it takes a very long time compared to other methods and it’s not as flexible. For a 14-minute video I tried, it took about an hour and a half. If you extrapolate this out, converting one 2-hour movie would take around 12 hours! It also doesn’t let you control how your video is converted. *
Videora	Videora iPod Converter is the other free application that until last week was the only option for Windows PC users if you didn’t want to pay to convert.Pros: it’s very flexible, and it’s free. You can tell it how to convert your files in many ways – by the screen dimensions, the frame rate, the quality/size (bit rate), even what kind of audio quality you want along with the video. In addition, you can queue up a series of files you want to convert without having to come back to your computer after each is done. It also can convert files in a much shorter time than iTunes or Quicktime Pro – as low as around 15 minutes or so for a 14-minute video.Cons: the major downside to Videora is that it is not particularly easy to use. It’s free and the people who created it haven’t come out with a new version for over two months. It’s beta software, which means not all the bugs or user interface design issues have been worked out, and while they have a very useful discussion forum, it’s the fellow users who provide the answers, not the programmers, so they can only guess at some things, and of course can’t make fixes to the actual software. There is no real official support. If you are not afraid of spending some time trying to figure things out, it’s perfectly usable, but you will probably have to look through the discussion forums a lot as you run into inevitable problems. I’ve also posted a couple of entries (here and here) myself that go into a fair amount of detail about converting using Videora that might be helpful.
ffmpegX	ffmpegX is a UNIX application that was ported to Mac OSX (which is a varant of UNIX). While it may be more streightforward than the typical UNIX command-line application, it may not be as simple as many other programs made for the Mac. Since I don’t own a Mac, I can’t really speak to how simple this is to use or how well it works, but the engine it uses is used by many of these other converters Windows. If you are a Mac user and have used this, some feedback would be great!
iSquint	Another free Mac converter, iSquint looks like it will give you a lot of recommendations and hand-holding, but still let you tweak settings if you need to. Since I don’t have a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate it directly, but it seems to be the preferred converter out there for Macs. If anyone has used it, feedback would be great
3gp Converter	3gp Converter is a free Windows program that I don’t think tons of people use or even know about. It apparently is developed by a developer or group of developers in Japan. They don’t have an English language site, but here’s a Google-translated site which you might be able to at least glean a little from. Fortunately the program itself does have different language versions and there’s a simple but good tutuorial on how to use it here. The program itself is very simple. You just drag your video file onto it, and it converts it. It lets you pick a few different options in terms of bit rate settings, that yield a H.264 variations, and one high-quality, high resolution MPEG4 SP version suitable for outputting to TV. It converted all the video files I through at it, but I didn’t test every conceivable file, so their could be ones that it still has problems with. Still, for a free program, there’s no reason not to use this one until (or if) you run into problems.The one problem I did encounter was that it doesn’t seem to be able to format widescreen videos properly. There are no options for dealing with different aspect ratios, so it just stuffs everything into the same standard dimensions, so widescreen movies get squeezed and so look wrong.Maybe a new version will deal with this (the developer seems to come out with a new version somewhat regularly, although the last version was almost two months ago), and looking at their configuration files, one might just be able to change the resolutions there, but that would mean some extra work that detracts from the simplicity of this program.I would say, though, that for programs that are not widescreen, this is by far the easiest program I’ve used, albeit with few ways to customize the output. But if you’re looking for something that requires no learning curve and still gives you more output options than iTunes and does it several times faster, this is probably your best bet. It also happens to be one of only two programs (the other being iTunes) out of all of these (shareware and commercial ones included), that automatically adds the video to your iTunes library.
Nero Recode	I know that a number of people have gotten this Windows application to work, but I could not. Nero Recode is one of the many products within the collection of products branded as Nero. Initially I was confused about this and thought you could only use it if you bought the commercial product called Nero Ultra. That includes Nero Recode, but you can also download Nero Recode for free.In any case, I was able to convert files that would play through iTunes, but no matter how careful I was to customize these according to the settings that I knew would work on the iPod, these videos would not transfer. So, while you might be able to get this to work for you if you work at it, it’s probably not going to be easy for the beginner. It lets you see a lot of information and particularly for DVD conversions (you still need a seperate program to remove a copy-protected DVD’s encryption - see below), it looks like it would be very useful as far as picking a given audio track, subtitles, etc.

* What does this mean and why would you care? When converting a video file, just like when converting an audio file, you can make the end product smaller (so that you can fit more on your iPod). This size goes hand in hand with the quality of the video and is expressed as a measurement of “bit rate.” The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality and the bigger the file (and the longer the conversion will take to some extent). In addition to how small you make the file itself, you can also change the actual dimensions of the video as seen on the screen. ITunes just converts everything to the exact dimensions of the iPod’s screen, which is 320×240 pixels. In most cases, that’s fine, but if you ever want to be able to show these videos on a TV (or your computer), the small dimensions blown up to a 19″ Monitor or 27″ TV will not look good at all! More ondisplaying your video from your iPod to your TV below.

Of course, you don’t have to go with the free options at all. Even if you are on a budget, most of the options that cost money are only around $30, and hey, you spent $300-400 for that iPod and probably a bunch more for a case and/or some other accessories, right? So what’s another $30 for a program that will do all your video conversion chores? These are all Windows programs - I’ve yet to see any for the Mac that aren’t free except for Quicktime Pro which is now somewhat irrelevant now that iTunes can do the same conversions it can

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The problem really is in choosing the right one of these programs for you. There are a growing number of these programs and probably a lot of similarity between them. I’ve tried out a bunch of these to test them, but haven’t spent nearly the time on them that I have with Videora, so my personal recommendation would actually be to read these micro reviews and then download and try out the ones that sound good to you (or all of them for that matter), since they all have trial versions for free download. Those trial versions have limitations that make them unusable or at least very impractical for anything but testing purposes, but they will give you a good idea about how easy they are to use and how well they work..

Options at an Added Price
PQDVD	PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter is the application that I seem to hear mentioned about most online, probably because it also lets you record DVD’s (see below). You can convert many different types of video files with it and specify quality/size (bit rate) settings, dimensions of the screen, whether you want to crop or stretch the image to fill more/less of the iPod’s (or your TV’s) screen, etc. It makes many of these options fairly easy to understand in a graphical, uncluttered way, and the conversion (as with most of these non-free programs), is pretty quick. However, PQDVD doesn’t have quite the flexibility of some of the others. Basically you sacrifice some flexibility for ease-of-use.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft iPod Video Converter is more flexible in some ways than PQDVD, as it lets you specify the type of encoding you want to use (similar to Videora). But unlike Videora, it also gives you recommendations for the best choice of settings and also gives you more information about how various settings will affect your final video. Cucusoft also, like Videora, has a batch feature so that you can give it multiple files and then let it run for a long time without the need to come back and tell it to convert each and every one. Unfortunately Cucusoft was the only program of the ones here that I got to work in the first place which didn’t automatically determine the correct dimensions for the widescreen video I fed it, so this means a bit more work in figuring that out for different videos.	$29
Xilisoft	Xilisoft iPod Video Converter lets you customize settings, but doesn’t give you much help in this area. There are pull-down lists of possible settings, but many of these have just one option, and so if you don’t like it, you have to type in your own. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this could very easily create files that aren’t compatible in some way with the iPod. So it seems that it doesn’t provide much in the way of ease-of-use. To me, this seems the closest program in some ways to the free Videora, except that it doesn’t allow the user to set up different profiles for different types of convesions, and it costs $30.I attempted to convert a test .avi file (which converted fine on all the other products), but the end result couldn’t even be added to my iTunes library, let alone to the iPod. This was using the default settings for the program. Perhaps I needed to change them, but the point is here that this is not a program for beginners so I’m not sure why anyone would pay $30 for it when a similarly difficult program is available for free.	$29
ImTOO	I’m not sure which of these programs came first, but it appears that ImTOO is just a rebranding of Xilisoft or visa versa. The prices for each of the conversion programs, the dvd-ripping programs, and the bundles are identical. And if you look at the screenshots of Xilisoft and of ImTOO, and you will see they are also virtually identical!	$29
WinAVI	WinAVI 3GB/MP4/PSP/iPod Video Converter (maybe they need to come up with a catchier name?) has some interesting features which I’m not sure I’d use, like being able to flip the image upside down and soften it. (What I’d really like to see is something that would increase the brightness of an image since some darker videos are difficult to see if you have a protective screen that produces glare and you’re not in a dark room.)WinAVI lets you control the dimensions of the video and the bit rate settings, although the numbers they use seem not to coincide with what the standard bit rate options are. It will also let you split the output file into multiple files, or merge multiple input files into one output file. I’m not sure what I would use those for, but I know some people have uses for these features. A batch mode also adds to the functionality.	$25
AVOne	AVOne iPod Video Converter seems the least polished of any of these programs. First of all, it took much longer to convert the file. It’s batch feature doesn’t seem to work. It has only a few built-in profile setups, and while it lets you create your own profiles with many settings options, it gives you absolutely no help in figuring out what those settings should be. Finally, after a couple of tries of specifying exactly where I wanted my output file to be saved, after converting (which took a lot longer than the other programs), I simply could not locate any output file on my computer.	$25
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder is the most expensive converter. It is fairly easy to use and understand, and has a lot of customization features if you want to tweak things. Unfortunately, while it was able to convert some video files, it was unable to convert one that I had downloaded from a digital camcorder. The other programs didn’t have such a problem, except for Videora which also couldn’t convert it. The resulting file when played in iTunes was covered with green and red blocks constantly moving. At first I thought this was feature that prevented one from using a trial version for real use, but after converting another file that wasn’t from my video camera, it played fine in iTunes. I was able to transfer both files to my iPod. So far so good, except when I tried to play either one, not only did the iPod not play the files, but playing them actually caused the iPod to reset! I did not use any special settings for these conversions, so while there may be some ways to avoid these problems, it’s another case of a program that takes a lot of extra work. While I didn’t mind this extra work for a free program like Videora, it seems a bit too much when paying $45! Some people have no problem with this program, so, as I stated at the beginning, you might want to try it out - even though I didn’t get it working doesn’t mean you might not have great luck with it.	$45

Once you convert your video to an iPod-compatible format, you still need to add them to your iTunes library in order to have them transferred to your iPod, so check out the section about doing this above.

ITunes to iPod

As I mentioned above, if your video isn’t compatible with the iPod, it won’t transfer to it even if you’ve been able to add it to iTunes and even if iTunes can play your video. iTunes can play many kinds of video files, but as I’ve detailed above, the iPod has a lot more limitations. However, there does appear to be a problem that some people have run into when trying to transfer video to their iPod even when it is compatible. That problem is in a setting in iTunes that turns off automatic transfers of videos. Some people have suggested that this is actually the default setting, so I would recommend also double-checking that you have this set correctly. You will need to first plug your iPod into your computer, and when your computer recognizes the iPod, choose Preferences from the Edit menu. Then go to the iPod tab, which is the second from the left. Here make sure that the topmost “Automatically update all videos” is selected:

Note that this only applies to those who have their iTunes set to automatically synch their files. If you have it set for manual transfer, then this tab will be disabled. In this case, like with music files, you just have to drag the video file from your iTunes library onto the iPod icon in iTunes in order to transfer a video to it.

DVD’s

For DVD’s, it can be a little more complicated than converting a video clip that you download off the Internet from one of the free sources I’ve mentioned, or via the iTunes Music Store. DVD’s were never meant to be converted or copied. They contain an encryption scheme called CSS (Content Scrambling System) that is supposed to prevent this. Within just a couple of years after DVD’s hit the market, though, CSS was cracked and this crack, known as DeCSS, became widely available on the net both as pure code, as well as parts of numerous programs designed to allow the average user to “decrypt” their DVD’s. Depending on which country you live in, these programs may or may not be legal to use. The whole issue of legality is very confusing. On the one hand, in the U.S., “fair use” seems to dictate that one should be able to freely make backup copies of a DVD you own for personal use. On the other hand, part of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act specifically forbids compromising the copy-protection for a DVD. There are numerous court cases that are trying to determine exactly what is legal and what isn’t, but in the mean time, such programs are available and being used ubiquitously, making things that much more uncertain.

In any case, in order to put your DVD’s into an iPod compatible format, you will need to transfer the file to your hard drive, remove the encryption, and then finally convert it to a format that’s compatible with the iPod. This can require one or two different programs depending on what kind of functional is included. Again, there are both free ones and ones that have a price tag:

Free Options
DVD Decryptor	The developers of this Windows application were forced to remove it and they were eventually bought by Macrovision. One can find the application on the net, but it’s legality is in question. It will allow you to break the encoding of a DVD and transfer it to your hard drive, after which various conversion applications can be used to make it iPod-compatible. Videora has a tutorial on their site on how to use it to create the inital file. Be forwarned, though, this is not a program designed with ease-of-use in mind.	$0
DVDFab Decryptor	DVDFab Decrypter is another program that’s similar to DVD DecrypterThis is another program similar to DVD Decryptor but with a simpler infterface. It copies the files from the DVD to one’s hard drive and removes the encryption in the process. Just note that it, like DVD Decrypter, will not create a file that is iPod compatible. You will still need to convert it using one of the programs listed above.	$0
Fair Use Wizard LE	This Windows application takes a slightly more user-friendly approach than DVD Decrypter, guding you through the process of converting your DVD a little more. But it’s also different in that it doesn’t just decrypt, but decrypts and converts to an xVid format video file. This process itseld could take a couple of hours, and then on top of this you will have to reconvert it to an iPod-compatible format. The same site has a $20 program that will supposedly convert to iPod-compatible formats (see below).	$0
HandBrake	HandBrake is the one free Mac option that will remove the encryption on a DVD and save the resulting file to your hard drive. Since I don’t own a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate this myself, but if anyone does own this, feedback would be great.	$0
Options at an Added Price
AnyDVD	This Windows Application will remove the encryption from a DVD, after which you will need another program to convert it to an iPod-compatible format. At first I thought it might be more of a wizard than DVD Decrypter, but really what it’s meant to do is to do the decryption transparently. That way you can tell a conversion program to look at one of the files on the DVD itself, or maybe you still need to copy it to your hard drive, but the decryption happens as you copy. The problem is that there’s no good way of figuring out what files are for what on the DVD. Sure some may be simple if there’s only one file or a few with similar names, but that’s not always the case. For some movies, you have many files each representing a different chapter. On DVD’s of TV episodes, you can have one or more files representing each episode	$39
PQDVD	Yes, I already mentioned PQDVD above, but it also will let you convert DVD’s. However, I’m not sure if it actually removes the encryption from DVD’s like some of these other programs, but rather streams the dvd video at faster than normal speed and somehow “captures” it and converts it on the fly. You will actually see the DVD playing while it’s converting. I’m not sure if I was simply doing something wrong or if my system did not have enough free memory or processor speed, but while it did convert a small clip for me successfully, when I played it back both in iTunes as well as on my iPod, the audio was badly distorted.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft also makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows which seems to work very similarly to PQDVD, but gives the advanced user more access to custom settings. Of course many of these settings will be meaningless if you are at all a beginner at this stuff. I also experienced the same audio distorions with this product as with PQDVD, so chances are it’s a problem with audio on my computer. The other thing I could not figure out with this program was how to limit the program to just a specified length of time. This would be helpful for recording a bunch of TV episodes on a DVD into seperate files (especially if these are not seperated into seperate files on the DVD), but it doesn’t seem like there’s any easy way to do this here, whereas in PQDVD, one can scroll through to find exactly where one episode ends and another begins, and then you can specify when you want the start of the recording and the end to be.	$30
Xilisoft	Xilisoft makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows as well, and it seems to work in a similar way as the previous two. Unfortunately I could not get it to work at all. Others I know have been able to get it to work, and I know there have been some complaints concerning audio syncing. But without even being able to record anything myself, it’s impossible for me to say much about this tool.	$29
Fair Use Wizard	Fair Use Wizard also offers a “Full Edition” that provides some additional features. Whether those features are worth it, I’m not sure, and there’s no way to try them out, since the Lite edition is the only one you can download from their site without actually paying. However, from what I can tell from the Lite Edition, it has some option for iPod Video, so it might be useful as an all-in-one DVD conversion tool.	$20
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder also has a DVD recording facility that works somewhat like PQDVD and CUCUSoft, except that it doesn’t actually play the DVD while recording, at least not in a way that’s visible to you. It offers a good deal of flexibility and it’s pretty easy and straightforward. Unlike PQDVD and CUCUSoft, when I played the sample I had recorded in iTunes, there were no problems with the audio. This could have just been a fluke, but it was still very promising. Then I transferred the video over to my iPod and started to play it. The same thing happened as with the non-DVD video clips I had converted with this same program - when starting to play the file, my iPod would reset itself. Not good! Again, maybe I was doing something wrong, or I wasn’t setting something in the right way, but for a $45 program, I really don’t think it should be reseting my iPod unless I really screw with the settings in a very creative way!	$45
DVDFab Express, Gold, Platinum	DVDFab Decryptor is a free program, but the same developer has made several other versions that have various other capabilities which may be useful for some people, but aren’t necessary to get one’s DVD video onto an iPod. Still, if these extra features appeal to you and you can afford the price, than it might be a good option. I chose not to try these out myself since I successfully tested the free version and can’t imagine these would be that different.	$40-60

TV Playing

One other issue that I alluded to above is that you can actually take your iPod to a friend’s house (or on vacation, or on a business trip, etc., etc.) and play a video for them not just on the iPod’s screen, but on a TV that you hook your iPod to in the same way that you would hook your DVD player to your TV. Unfortunately the iPod can’t do this “out of the box” but instead requires the purchase of an additional cable. Apple sells one for $30, although you can get it for a lot cheaper at Amazon.com or even cheaper at Handhelditems.com and a retractable one to boot.

Because the iPod screen is so small, the standard iPod-compatible video is pretty small in resolution – 320×240 pixels. When this tiny image is then blown up to fit a much larger screen, everything gets that much fuzzier. In order to avoid this, you can convert the video in such a way that the resolution is higher, and some of the applications I’ve listed will actually guide you with the words “TV.” However, not all programs let you do this, even if you do it yourself with customized settings. If you convert something to a higher resolution for this type of usage, it will come at the price of added conversion time and storage space, and you won’t be able to convert to just any resolution - at some point you also bump up against a limitation of what the iPod can handle, so you will never get, for example, a DVD-quality video image played from your iPod to a TV. It may look very good, and you might not even be able to tell the difference on a small TV (19″ or smaller) between a video played through your iPod and one from a DVD player. Still, for anything bigger than a 19″ set, the picture will be inferior. And compared to a true high definition picture, forget it! If you do want to convert to higher resolutions, I would recommend taking a look at the two entries (here and here) I posted about converting with Videora. Whether you use Videora or not, these will at least give you some ideas about what issues to look for.

Final Notes

When Apple came out with the Video iPod back in late September of last year, they did it very tentatively – at least as far as video was concerned. They provided only a handful of TV series in their iTunes Music Store, and in order to make other sources of video play on the iPod, Apple would only tell you that you needed to purchase their QuickTime Pro at $30 additional charge. As you can see, in the proceeding three and a half months, a slew of new content has come out both within the iTunes Music Store and on the net in free form. In addition, many companies have been developing programs that make getting your videos onto your iPod. It’s still a little confusing for the average consumer, though, but if the progress during these first few months is any indication, things should get easier and easier, sooner rather than later. In the mean time, I hope this guide has helped some of you get your mind around the various tasks, options, and concepts concerning getting video onto your iPod.

Since writing my last entry, I hadn’t done too much with video on my iPod other than download a few video podcasts. However, this last week I decided to put an episode of West Wing on the iPod. West Wing is actually in widescreen format. I encoded it with a 640×360 resolution accordingly and this produced what I thought was a flawless program. No banding even the resolution was higher than that of the iPod screen. This made some sense because the banding that I noticed for the full-frame clip I was using for my testing was mainly in the top 10th of the screen.

(Note: after writing this article, I’ve done much more research on putting videos on an iPod and wrote up a new article that covers this in more basic terms - A Beginner’s Guide to Video for the IPod. I urge you to read that article first, especially if you don’t have much or any experience with digital video, the iPod, or both together)

Great, I thought! Now I can at least use one format for displaying on the iPod or the TV. But wait, it gets better!

I decided to copy an episode of Six Feet Under onto the iPod and test out another hypothesis by the moderator of the Videora iPod Converter forum, Sketchy, that you should make sure that your resolution was divisible by 16, since MPEG4 divides the screen up into 16×16 blocks. 640 and 360 are both divisible by 16[it turns out 360 is not divisible by 16, oops, but read on], so maybe that was the key to flawless, higher-resolution video on the iPod. The previous 544 x 408 resolution wasn’t [and it turns out that it wasn't even the highest resolution allowable - it's 552 x 414]. 544 is divisible, but 408 isn’t. In order to maintain the 1:33 aspect ratio, the highest resolution you can use that doesn’t go over the total pixel count of 230,400, but which is still divisible by 16 in both width and height, is 512 x 384[oops again, it turns out that it is 528x400] So, I encoded the program using this and voila, perfect-looking video!

Great news again, right? Now I can do the same thing with full-frame videos and just use that one resolution for both iPod viewing and TV viewing. Sure 512 x 384 isn’t HD, or even DVD quality. But it’s perfectly watchable on even my 34″ TV. Yet again, though, it gets better, or perhaps better and worse at the same time?

I thought I should update the spreadsheet with this information, so I dug out the old 55-second clip, and proceeded to convert it again but this time using the new 512 x 384 resolution instead of the older 544 x 408. I did this for all the various modes, 1-pass and 2-pass, and put them on the iPod. I started watching them and they all looked great! This wasn’t a big surprise, since the Six Feet Under episode also looked great. But here is the weird part – I also reloaded the old 544 x 408 clips for comparison sake and when I started watching some of these, they also looked absolutely fine! No banding whatsoever! I was flummoxed.

So I bring my iPod into the bedroom where my wife is still half awake and ask her to look at these since I’m starting to not trust my own eyes anymore. Only when I play them for her, the banding is back! And it’s not just back on the old clips, but the new clips as well. Huh? When I was first playing them back in the office, my iPod was plugged into the computer getting charged, so I thought, hey, maybe that has something to do with it. So I plug it into the wall and try again. No go, the banding is still there. I than decided to try one more thing – I reset the iPod. Once I did this, no more banding was visible!

So, to conclude, the problems with banding are not unavoidable. If you experience them, just reset your iPod. My guess is that putting the iPod in and out of video mode can produce this artifact, but if you just watch one program straight through, there shouldn’t be an issue. Of course resetting can be a nuisance, but if you were interested in only storing one format for a given file which you plan to view on both the iPod and a TV (or your computer), then it might not be that big a deal.

Based on this further development, I’ve edited the spreadsheet and included the new information. Based on this new information, my conclusion is a bit different. Basically, if you never see the possibility of wanting to play these files on a TV or computer, then you should stick with one of the 320×240 resolutions, preferably one that has a higher bit rate that would produce less artifacting. As I said above, H.264 > CBR, 1 pass is a good option since it’s fast to convert and small in size. This will allow you to convert an hour’s worth of video in a little over an hour and will produce a file that is about 380MB.

However, if you do want to have a single file for multiple uses – iPod viewing, TV viewing, computer viewing, then choose one of the 544 x 408 552 x 414 resolution ones, again with the higher bit rate (or lower Qscale). I’ve found I can’t really tell the difference between the higher bit rate (lower Qscale) versions. They all look incredibly crisp and clear, with no artifacting. However, the one that seems to come out on top in terms of both a smaller size file as well as a faster conversion is the plain MPEG4>CBR yet again. For a one-hour piece of video, the conversion time will likely be between two and three hours, perhaps closer to three. The file size will be about 1GB. That’s not really much better than the video stored on a DVD, which is definitely better quality.

Obviously the tradeoff of having the flexibility of one file for all purposes is that it will take a lot longer to convert your video and it will also take up considerably more space – maybe three times as much! For some people, though, this is a good compromise. For others who want to store more on their iPod but still want the possibility of displaying their videos on a TV via the iPod, yet another option might be worth the additional time – actually encoding it in both a 320×240 version specifically for viewing on the iPod’s screen, and an additional version at 544 x 408 552 x 414. This latter version could be archived on your hard drive or even DVD-R, although at 1GB/hour, you might need a lot of DVD’s to store a big collection!

Personally, I don’t have the time, patience or storage space to convert my DVD collection, so I suppose I will just convert things as I feel the urge to watch them and will probably use the higher resolution unless I have no intention of watching a given video via the TV…

There are many programs currently available that will convert video of various kinds to a format compatible with the video iPod. While none of these are prohibitive in cost, I didn’t feel like spending lots of time downloading trial versions to figure out which one might work best, nor did I feel like spending on one that a few people like only to discover there’s another that actually does a better job. Since the video iPod is so new, many software companies that make converters are just now modifying their products to include conversion options for the iPod. Maybe in a month or two the dust will have settled a little more and we’ll start seeing some in-depth reviews comparing some of these applications to one another.

(Note: after writing this article, I’ve done much more research on putting videos on an iPod and wrote up a new article that covers this in more basic terms - A Beginner’s Guide to Video for the IPod. I urge you to read that article first, especially if you don’t have much or any experience with digital video, the iPod, or both together)

In the mean time, as far as I’m aware, the only free program that’s been available is one from the same people who brought you PSP Video 9 (a video converter for the PSP) and Videora. The name of the program is “Videora iPod Converter” and it has a wide (and sometimes overwhelming for a newbie) assortment of settings one can manipulate for your conversions. Aside from the obvious ones like resolution and bit rate, there are others like Qscale, and conversion mode that are not nearly as well known.

As with much freeware, there’s no real documentation available, nor is the program very straightforward to use. You need to create a profile for a given collection of settings, or use one of the programs presets. If you choose to use your own settings, you’re in no way guaranteed that they will work with the iPod. You may be able to get them into iTunes but they won’t transfer to the iPod if some setting is off.

A Quick Note: I’ve done some additional testing and posted some updates to this entry, so if you’ve found it via Google, please see my Converting Videos for iPod, Take 2 entry after you’ve read this one.

Screenshot of Videora iPod Converter converting a file

Screenshot of Videora iPod Converter Profile Screen

The two settings that this happens for most often is bitrate and resolution. The iPod will only handle resolutions that add up to 230,400 pixels - whatever the width and height dimensions are, multiplied they can’t add up to more than this number or the file won’t transfer. Similarly, for H.264 files, iTunes will not transfer it if it has a higher bit rate than 768Kbps – although at least in this latter case there is a hack to get around this, thanks to a user on the Videor iPod Converter board named DaProphecy. Apparently the chip in the iPod that plays video has the ability to play higher quality video than Apple lets on in their specifications. iTunes prevents you from transferring in this higher bitrate despite it being playable, so you basically have to trick iTunes into transferring the file. This, of course, is ridiculous and should not require a hack to get around. Hopefully Apple will update iTunes and make this a non-issue.

Because of the massive numbers of settings, and no real clue as to which ones would work best in which cases, I determined to spend an inordinate amount of time transcoding a 55-second video clip into as many of these as made sense at the time. In all, I made 40 different conversions, although I’m sure I barely scratched the surface in terms of what I could have done. Still, I wanted to get a general sense of what each setting would do, how they would compare to each other in terms of the amount of time the conversion took, how big the file was, and what the quality of the video was both on the iPod and when exported out to a TV. I figured if I was going to convert my 200+ DVD library to video files for the iPod, that I should be fairly certain what settings to pick so that I don’t waste time converting to something which in the end wasn’t as efficient as another format in terms of time and storage space.

I set about creating an Excel spreadsheet, linked here, which contains all my data, as well as my impressions of quality. The first sheet shows various conversions to H.264, whereas the second sheet displays results for conversions to MPEG4. Both of these are compatible with the iPod.

To summarize my findings, much of it was predictable. Usually the higher the bit rate, the better the quality, although occasionally it was hard to tell the difference. When exported to TV, the higher the resolution, the sharper the image. However, there were some findings that I hadn’t expected. First of all, making a 2-pass conversion usually did not improve the video noticeably, but did double the time needed to convert. File sizes for 2-pass conversions were almost always about the same give or take, the only big exception being MPEG4 > QC-VBR mode, which decreased the file size by about 2/3, although unfortunately this smaller file size also equated with much poorer quality video.

While I probably will not use it extensively, the iPod’s ability to pipe the audio and video out to a TV is something that really interested me. While critics complain about the size of the iPod’s screen for video, you can’t complain about it if you pipe that video out a 27” (or greater) monitor. I own a 34” widescreen TV which I suppose is about the same as a 27” standard (4:3) TV and used that for testing these conversions (as well as viewing them on the iPod itself). One thing I found interesting was that some video artifacts were much more noticeable on the iPod than on the TV– for example some pixilation when clashing colors like red and green were adjacent to each other. Even some of the “blotchiness” of certain colors seemed less noticeable sometimes on that large screen. I was viewing it from about 5 feet away, which I think is equivalent to holding the iPod about 5 inches from my face! I expected all the defects to be much more obvious, but perhaps the interlacing of a TV screen somehow smoothes out some of these.

What I did find was that some of the higher resolution conversions I made, when played on my TV, were excellent in quality. Perhaps not quite DVD quality, but maybe equivalent to a VHS tape if not even cable or even satellite. Unfortunately, these same files, when played on the iPod, had artifacts that made them difficult to watch – similar to the “banding” that one might get and worn VHS tape. This was particularly evident whenever the camera panned at all. So my initial hope that I’d be able to convert one file and have it play in optimal quality on both the iPod as well as the TV was not to be. The lower resolution conversions are not terrible when viewed on the TV, but it’s pretty obvious that something’s off, at least from 5 feet away. The picture just isn’t very sharp, even with the best conversions. It’s a little like watching a 30-year-old TV.

As far as the conversions themselves go, they took a bit longer than I expected. Even the shortest one took about 15% more time than the clip itself, and the worst took 700% as long! Then again, you may have different results. I converted these on a 2.5-year-old laptop with a 2Ghz P4 processor and 1.25GB of RAM. Very possibly you have something newer and faster. File sizes varied greatly as well, from a small 3.4MB to a whopping 25.6MB for just this small clip. Luckily, the 2^nd Pass, which normally doubled the time to convert, was usually not a factor in terms of quality. And file sizes didn’t always equate with quality either.

This photo was taken from my TV. It was a lower bitrate setting and you can see blotchiness, pixelation, and other artifacts pretty clearly.

Here’s another picture off of my TV, but this one at a much higher bitrate. While still not crystal clear, it definitely looks much better than the first image!

I have to divide my conclusion into to separate categories – best for iPod and best for iPod to TV. If one is mainly concerned with playing on the iPod itself, it seems the winner is probably H.264 > CBR at 768Kbps, 1 Pass. This has one of the smallest file sizes and fastest conversion times. It’s certainly possible that some may find some of the other modes to edge it out slightly, but most of those modes produce files that are at least double the size, maybe more, and take at least a little more time to convert. But if storage isn’t an issue (on the iPod itself, even at the higher 60GB level it still IS an issue), and your system is incredibly fast, or you have extra machines to do conversions for you, you may find it more worth it to try some of the other settings.

For iPod to TV, the winner seems to be MPEG4 > CBR at 544×408, 2500Kbps and one pass. This had one of the shortest conversion times and the smallest file size for a higher-resolution conversion, and rivaled or beat all of the other such conversions.

A final disclaimer: these quality settings are of course subjective. As they say, your mileage may vary. I’ve compared a pretty limited range of video information in a 55-second clip, and I’ve done this for each of the 40 files on both the iPod and the TV. That’s a lot of stuff to compare even for a relatively short clip. I’ve already spent a week or so transcoding and then reviewing all of these, but I can see where to really scrutinize this stuff in detail, one would need a larger clip with a lot more variations in color, motion, etc., and have the luxury of being able to review each clip about 20 times to note various things down. I’m not even an expert at any of this and so my impressions are from someone who is not a videophile per se, but just a gadget freak who also loves to watch DVD’s. So please take this all with a grain of salt. I did the best estimation I could within my limited timeframe, expertise, and tools, but I can’t claim this as being at all definitive. I look forward, in fact, to those who might be able to clarify, confirm, or dispute certain findings so that a more accurate picture for all can be obtained. In the mean time, I hope this serves as a decent primer for those who, like myself, found themselves lost in the sea of possible settings with no idea how they might translate into quality, time, and space in the real world.

Update (12/23/05): It turns out this is far from the end of the story. I’ve discovered some new peculiarities with video for the iPod that caused me to write a whole new blog entry, so if you’ve found this article via a google search or a link on a discussion forum, etc., you might want to check out my newest entry, Converting Videos for iPod, Take 2.

Several weeks ago, Apple announced their newest version of the iPod, the much anticipated one that allows owners to watch videos.

I generally have very good rationalizations when it comes to upgrading my gadgets and this time was no different. After all, I had resisted getting the photo iPod when it came out earlier this year. No, I figured, there needs to be a very significant value added over and above what I have in order to upgrade. Having a better screen, even allowing you to view pictures (something I could do on my Phone for years now) was not enough.

While I said I’m not the biggest video buff, especially these days with a new baby in the house, the various new features and enhancements that were better than my old 4th Generation monochrome iPod (all of a year old now) just added up to a critical mass and convinced me that it was time to upgrade:

For one, there’s the video, of course. While I’m probably still probably going to be using the iPod 99% or more for audio, it would be nice to load many of my unwatched DVD’s that I’ve been wanting to watch for years, not to mention TV shows that I miss on a regular basis these days, or whole series that I missed out on. As you may have heard, Apple and Disney teamed up to offer some of Disney’s content, which includes some ABC shows like “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”. I’d always heard raves about Lost, but never got around to watching it last year and I’m one of those people who refuse to pick up watching a show when I haven’t come in at the beginning – at least dramatic shows. While buying the shows individually can add up at $2 a pop, one thing that I haven’t heard mention in the other articles I’ve read about these downloadable shows is that you can actually buy a season’s worth of a show for nice discounted - about $1.40 per show instead of the normal $1.99. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with a season that isn’t complete - I can’t pay for all of season 2 of Lost because it hasn’t all been made available yet and Apple just doesn’t seem to have the mechanisms in their iTunes Store to handle this kind of “subscription” of ongoing content. Maybe their venture into podcasting will help them implement something like this in the future, though.

Then there’s home video. We got a digital camcorder last Spring in anticipation of our first child and I’ve been slowly trying to figure out video editing and production. I figured it would be a nice thing to keep a collection of clips of events or just clips of our daughter playing and smiling.

The new iPod will also let you record audio at 44kbps, rather than a measly 8kbps for previous models. Not that I have any big plans to start my own podcast, but this does at least open up the possibility of recording audio on the go, whether that’s just notes to myself, a conversation, a class, or our daughter “talking” to us.

The large capacity of the 60GB iPod would seem like more than enough for all your possible needs, but Video can take up a LOT of space. We are talking hundreds of megabytes per hour - and that’s highly compressed! Even at 60GB, Apple states its capacity at all of 150 hours of Video. This might seem a lot, but I have about 1,400 hours of Audio Books currently on my iPod, and these take up less than 20GB. This audio book collection keeps growing as I continue to download books from a subscription to Audible.com and little time to actually listen to them and move them off the iPod. Another 12GB or so are taken up by a music collection which I’m sure will grow as our daughter gets older and we put more music for her on it. Finally, there are couple of gigabytes of podcasts that I can’t seem to get caught up on either! So already I was getting dangerously close to my old iPod’s limit of 40GB! That extra space will really be useful, although of course I would love to have 100GB (or 200GB for that matter) instead of 60GB!

My old iPod supposedly had 12 hours of battery life, and while that might have been true initially, it always seemed the battery meter was getting low way before that time. It could be the battery meter was just faulty, who knows. In any case, the new 60GB model that I bought is rated at 19+ hours of playtime for music, so I think I could safely listen for many days without having to recharge. Of course, Video can kill the battery in around 3 hours, so if I end up using it a lot for that, I may have to look into a battery pack that expands battery life to 9 hours for video.

Finally, the new iPods are considerably thinner than the old ones. For someone who has lots of gadgets and sometimes carries them in pockets, this definitely helps me not look like a total buffoon, in addition to just being more comfortable to carry.

Oh yes, also, I figured, I could sell the old iPod on eBay and not pay full price for the new one.
Equipped with an airtight rationale for upgrading, I went to the Apple store the week after the new iPod was announced and was told that it wouldn’t be in until the end of the month (October). However, on the iLounge.com forums, people were sighting them at other Apple stores across the country, so I kept coming back and pestering the poor Apple store staff. Within a couple days they had the 30GB model, but it was not on display. Instead the item was tucked in the pocket of one of the staff that let me look at it. He said there would be no 60GB model until the following week, but I knew that these estimates seemed always to be very conservative. So I continued to return every day and ask if they had a 60GB model and within just a couple of days, they did and I grabbed it!

Impressions

My general impressions of this “5th Generation” iPod model are generally favorable. I’ll talk about the video aspects of it below, but other than that, it seems to work as well, for the most part, as my old iPod. The big color screen is of course a whole lot prettier than my old monochrome model, but it also seems a bit more “sluggish” in its display. That is, when navigating between tracks or even between the different “pages” of an individual track (the scrubbing page, the album art page, the rating page, etc.), the screen doesn’t transition immediately, but lags a second or two before changing. When navigating to the next track, the audio for that track kicks in immediately, but the screen stays on the old track’s info for a second or two before changing. This isn’t a huge deal, but it makes it feel a lot less responsive than I would like. A couple of other minor issues that may or may not annoy some people follow:

1. The lack of a true power supply. All previous iPods had a separate power supply to charge the unit, but for these, you have to charge them via the computer via the supplied USB cable. Not particularly convenient if you want to take the iPod with you on a trip and don’t want to or can’t bring your computer! You can still buy a power supply separately, but for the price, Apple really shouldn’t be REMOVING accessories that were previously included.

2. The lack of a firewire interface. IPods can no longer connect to a computer via firewire. Some people believe firewire is faster than USB2 despite that according to the specifications USB2 is slightly faster. I’ve also heard that for video transfer from digital camcorder, firewire is critical. But I’m not sure how much of that is pure transfer speed and how much are other factors like consistently steady throughput. In any case, there’s probably not a tremendous difference between the two and so you wouldn’t notice a big different unless you are transferring a significant amount of content.

3. The removal of the port on the top of the iPod which many accessories use. This essentially has made these iPods incompatible with dozens, if not hundred of accessories that used this port. I had two of these myself, which I was fortunately able to sell along with my iPod. Many others, I’m sure, would have much rather keep their accessories, especially if they were expensive to begin with and/or can’t be resold for much.

Video: is it the Video iPod or iPod with Video?

When these new iPods first came out, Apple touted them not as the “Video iPod” but as an iPod “with Video capabilities.” It was as if they still weren’t ready to come out and say that video was in any way a central feature. They had to qualify this release by saying that the iPod was still primarily a music player. Whether this was BECAUSE they didn’t think the video capabilities were good enough, or whether they actually didn’t put everything they could into making video as good as it could be, I’m not sure. What I do know is that video on the iPod works reasonably well considering the small screen size, and some other issues that I’ll get to below.

As far as screen size is concerned, Apple enlarged the screen as much as they could within the confines of the standard iPod dimensions. They even sacrificed a bit of size of the click wheel in order to do this. Sure, they could have radically altered the design by stretching the screen across the entire front and changed the click-wheel to some other interface, or even implemented a touch screen that included the clickwheel as an image on that screen instead of an actual hardware click-wheel. Obviously, though, Apple did not want to take such a big risk in radically altering the interface that has helped them win and maintain such a commanding majority of the MP3 player market. As it stands, the screen is certainly watchable, but I don’t know if I would want to spend multiple hours staring at it! Even holding it up close, watching an episode of Lost, I felt a little like I was taking the images in through a straw. A big straw - maybe something akin to the cardboard tube that paper towel is wrapped around – but still it was constraining, if you understand what I mean.

The other way that Apple made a very hesitant step in the direction of Video was in its choice to only allow a couple of video formats to be compatible with the new iPod. Neither of these formats is proprietary per se, but they are not particularly popular outside of Apple’s own software. I’m sure part of this was also to prevent those who have big libraries of video in more popular formats (read “DVIX”), that they’ve either converted themselves or gotten illicitly off Grokster or BitTorrent, from easily playing them on the new devices, thus getting Apple slammed by big media companies as being too friendly towards file sharers. The result is that you can still do this, but it just takes more work: if you have a bunch of DVIX-encoded video files, you just have to convert them yet again to H.264 or MPEG4.

As for what kind of content there is available, you can download a select list of ABC TV shows - five to be exact from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. You can also download around 3,000 music videos. Whether it’s a 3-minute music video or a 30-minute TV show, the price is still $1.99. Apple also announced that, after the first 20 days from the launch of the new iPod and the video content in the iTunes music store, over 1 Million of those videos had been purchased. They did not reveal how many were the TV episodes and how many were music videos. Not bad considering this product was brand new and wasn’t even easy to find in stores for the first couple of weeks after the launch. Then again, I wonder how much of these purchasers were people like me who don’t plan to make a habit of doing it, but still wanted to see a sample of what they could have on their new iPods without going through all the effort of converting.

Unfortunately, it seems that the other networks are not jumping onto the Apple bandwagon, but at least for now scrambling to sign deals to make their content available in other “downloadable” forms. NBC has signed a deal with DirectTV and CBS has signed a deal with Comcast so that respective users of these services can download shows onto their DVR. But you can’t then transfer these shows to a portable player, which is the main feature of the iPod. So, this then forces people who want to have portable content into either recording these shows themselves and converting them, or even worse obtaining illegal copies on the Internet - all because the networks still want to limit how people watch, despite this supposed venture into new forms of content distribution. Just today AOL and Warner Bros. announced a new online venture to bring older tv shows to the internet, but again, there seems to be no plan to offer an option for content portability. Another announcement today from Hasbro does involve portable content, but only through Hasbro’s VUGO device. Even at best it looks like the interests involved will still end up carving out small domains where only certain content is available via a given service/device. A fragmented mess that’s bound to encourage pirates to record or obtain the content illegally and crack the protective DRM that prevents it from playing on all but one device.

Of course, as with music, one might already have a lot of video in the form of DVD movies. These movies can be transferred to the iPod, but it isn’t a trivial process. It takes time, some degree of technical knowledge, and experimenting with tools that are still clunky, in beta, or which will cost you additional money. And don’t expect Apple to help you very much in this effort. Apple’s tool for converting video to a format the iPod plays, Quicktime Pro (Mac users can also use iMovie), will not convert a DVD for you in and of itself - you still need a DVD decoder. Even then, Quicktime Pro is a $30 program and is one of the notoriously slowest video converters out there, although it does seem to work predictably without much hassle. Other applications are a lot speedier, but some have had difficulty in getting them to work at all. Some video formats simply won’t convert in some of these applications, whereas other problems could be in the various settings that one can use for a given conversion (bit rates, keyframes, resolution, etc., etc.) that aren’t exactly within the iPod’s constraints.

I experienced this myself in a free converter for Windows called Videora iPod Converter when I tried to convert some home video clips that were in uncompressed AVI format - what I thought was one of the most basic video formats. These AVI files were created with Adobe Premier Elements and whenever I tried to convert them, they would either not transfer to the iPod or they would only produce an audio track, not a video track. After trying just about every setting I could think of, I finally converted the AVI file to another format, and then converting it with Videora. This worked immediately. Other programs that offer conversion and dvd decryption in one package and have gotten some good reviews are Nero Recode and PQDVD on the PC side, and Handbreak on Mac (and Linux).

In addition to the video that one can download from Apple and the video that one can convert from DVD, there’s yet another category of freely available content available on the internet - video podcasts, video blogs, and other such episodic content. A new site that was just created to link to various kinds of content like this that is available in formats that will work right off the bat with the new iPod is FreeIpodVideos.org. A couple of other great sources for free video that you will undoubtedly have to convert to play on the new iPods are the Internet Archive’s Moving Images and Google Video.

The one other video issue that I hadn’t thought much about before I got the iPod (mainly because I’ve never had a video-capable device like this) is the issue of outputting the video to a TV. Now, one might ask why you would want to do this if the whole point of having a portable player is to watch things away from home. True, but at the same time, if you could watch something on a much bigger screen, wouldn’t you opt for that, especially if you want to share the video with multiple people? Just as people bring their iPods to friends and hook them to a stereo so that everyone can enjoy your music collection, so too can you share videos or pictures. You still have to buy an extra connector to do this either via Apple for $20, or from a Radio Shack or place like it for a bit less.

Once you export the video to TV, you will see that video that has been optimized specifically for the iPod within its native 320×240 resolution, and it will not look very good except on sets that are at most 25″. Since most people tend to have larger TV sets these days, this becomes a problem. One way to avoid it is by changing the resolution to something higher than what the iPod itself displays. The iPod will then just scale it down when displaying it on its small screen, but will display all the resolution when connecting to a TV – given the TV can display the given resolution. Unfortunately there are still limits. Apple lists a max resolution for MPEG4 files as 480×480. This is somewhat of an odd resolution, being completely square, as opposed to the more rectangular standard TV screen or the even more elongated widescreen dimensions. But that 480×480 is a bit misleading. What it really means is that 480 pixels times 480 pixels yields a total of 230,400 pixels. So one can create videos of ANY resolution as long as their total pixel count doesn’t exceed this. For example 640×360 also comes to 230,400 pixels, but is much more rectangular. In any case, when you pump up the resolution from 240 vertical lines to 360 or even higher, the picture becomes much more watchable on a large TV.

The one issue that remains may not be an issue for everyone, but it is for anyone who has a widescreen TV. It appears that the iPod doesn’t support a way to export anamorphic widescreen video to a widescreen TV. By this I mean that anything that is played on a widescreen TV via the iPod, whether that source video is in a widescreen format or not, does not fill the entire widescreen TV. Rather, they show up in the middle, so there are boxes on the sides as well as the top and bottom. I have asked on the forums about this and no one has given a satisfactory definitive issue. I even tried to get in touch with Apple, but I guess a lowly blogger is not worthy of a response. If they somehow surprise me after a week and actually answer my question, I will post an update here. Here’s an image of a widescreen movie playing on the iPod itself:

And here’s an image of that same movie piped out to my widescreen TV:

Again, this probably is not going to be a huge issue with a lot of people right now, but I was really hoping that this would work since most of my DVD’s and all my recent home video is filmed in widescreen. So having to watch it in this small area within my TV set seems a bit pointless. Then again, I could always export the home videos to DVD and get full resolution displays, it just would be nice to be able to view them in the same (or almost the same) way via the iPod on my own and other people’s widescreen TV’s…

Well, finally all the rumors of an iPod with a color screen for viewing photos have actually amounted to something. Today, Apple announced a new iPod called iPod Photo. It’s a bit more expensive than the standard iPod at $500 for a 40GB model ($100 more than the standard 40GB model), and $600 for a 60GB version.

The most detailed page about the iPod Photo that I’ve found so far indicates that it will display Tiff, PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP, but no RAW. You will be able to output images to a TV via S-Video or Composite connections, and there is an improved 15-hour battery life, the color screen, of course. In addition to being able to synch your images with a new version of iTunes released today, it will also let you sync album art for your music (and maybe audio book?) titles. The screen will be 220 by 176 pixels at 65,000 colors. This is not terrible, but still pretty small compared to other photo viewers, or even some mobile phones like the upcoming Treo 650.

I actually upgraded to a 40GB 4G iPod just a couple of months ago, so it’s a little annoying that if I had just waited a little bit longer, I could have saved up an additional $100 and gotten the added capability over what I have. So pardon me if what follows sounds a bit grumpy.

While progress is always good, I can’t help but think that Apple has really been taking advantage of the fact that they control a huge chunk of the market to make this progress really slow. We’ve had for quite some time now other products that have given larger screens with higher resolution, plus the ability to watch video in addition to just viewing individual pictures. The iPod Photo will not allow for direct loading via memory cards, rather one will have to use an accessory like the Belkin Media Reader at added expense and with a fairly slow transfer rate. Neither will you be able to play RAW digital photo files. Although the last two features might only appeal to digital photography enthusiasts, the fact that no video file format is going to be supported, not even Apple’s own Quicktime, is I think a universally understood disadvantage. Why did it take about four years for Apple to get a color screen to view images? Maybe by 2008 they will have an iPod Video! I don’t want to sound like a naysayer, but I am just dying for some major company like Sony, or even a well-known name like Epson to provide us with a device that not only does a whole lot more, but is actually designed as nicely as the iPod is. This might just provide some decent competition for the iPod which it currently does not have. And that’s why Apple can take it’s own sweet time introducing features that have been on other devices for years!

Thanks Gizmodo, for the heads up!

I finally came across the first Meme that I had an inclination to participate in. Ben posted about it here, and I figured it’s something I could write up quickly, and it has to do with one of my favorite toys, my iPod! List the first 10 songs that come up on your iPod on shuffle play. Here are my ten:

The Rach 3 - David Helfgoff (Shine)
Tunic - Sonic Youth
That’s Really Super, Supergirl! - XTC
Horn Concerto K 447 - Mozart
I shot the Sheriff - Bob Marley and the Wailers
Got a Feeling for Ya - Kelly Willis
Pushin Too Hard - The Seeds
The Race - Alla Pugachova
The Swan Lake ballet, Op. 20 - Dance of the Swans - Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Hall of Heads - They Might Be Giants

What’s on your iPod?

There’s been a slew of news recently that would have us believe that the iPod will no longer have the easy road it’s been on as the dominant MP3 player over the last few years. I have had an iPod for about a year now, and while I certainly enjoy it, I am in no way the religious adherent that some iPod fanatics are. In fact, I’ve never owned an Apple product OTHER than the iPod. However, I don’t see the iPod going away just yet. I do like all this additional competition, though, because theoretically it will only make the iPod better and cheaper. At the same time certain aspects of this competition can only cause chaos in the digital music world, which is not a good thing, really, for anyone..

Justin Blanton writes that “Obviously The Ipod is Dead” because they are refusing to “converge” with other devices like mobile phones, at least so far. He predicts that phones will eventually have hard drives that will enable them to play as much music as an iPod, or do even more. This may be true, but even now one can buy a “convergence device” like the Treo 600 for which one can buy 1GB memory cards capable of holding upwards of 300 songs each. Samsung will soon be coming out with 16GB cards that would hold more than the smaller 15GB iPod. Hard drives, or even built-in 4GB flash modules will, I’m sure, come to convergence devices in the not too distant future, especially as solid state memory prices continue to plummet. Will this kill the iPod? I doubt it. The problem is that such devices still carry a premium. A $700 phone is a lot more of an impediment – especially for a teen or 20-something – than a $300 iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Treo and use it for tons of things, but at the same time, I recognize that MP3 players like my iPod were made specifically with listening to audio in mind. Of course Apple’s design sense doesn’t hurt either. Apple has just one product in this category and they have worked continuously over the last few years to hone its functionality. On the other hand my Treo can play some formats that the iPod won’t, thankfully, and that brings me to the main thrust of this piece.

In the hunt to consolidate a market share in the digital music arena, Apple introduced their music download store, iTunes. Unfortunately, this store uses the AAC file format for copy prevention, and this format so far is not supported in almost any other player aside from the iPod. The iPod can also play the older and open MP3 format, but it cannot play a more advanced open format called Ogg Vorbis, nor can it play Microsoft’s Windows Media File (WMA) format, which is now supported on the vast majority of non-iPod players.

Two other big players in this arena have stepped up to the plate in an effort to compete with Apple. Microsoft has been pushing their WMA and has gotten it supported by many players (in addition to it’s PockePC devices and phones), and is not introducing its own music service to compete with iTunes. Sony, which has been making audio players much longer than Apple, may finally be thinking about adding MP3 capability to it’s players. Up until now, such devices would only use Sony’s proprietary Atrak format, a format also used by Sony’s new download service.

Sony owns a huge percentage of the popular music out there (not to mention the movies that could eventually make the jump to portability plus downloadability via sites like iTunes), and thus can dominate in this area especially if they finally offer MP3 (and possibly WMA) capability as may be the case. Sony is the king of proprietary formats, though, and the decision isn’t official.

In my thinking, unless something changes, we will eventually see a playing field where people just buy the device based on how well they work, and how programmable they are. Programmers (or hackers if you will) will (they already have in some cases) find ways to skirt both the copy protection mechanisms of these formats and the formats themselves so that they can be converted from one type of file to another, or at least make it so that they can be played on devices they weren’t meant to be played on.

In other words, the music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson from Napster. They should be banding together and offering music in the most attractive form. This means not only low prices, but also flexibility in how people can listen to it. By making things inconvenient and expensive, they are only driving the hackers to fill the justifiable desire on the part of consumers for a straightforward solution that allows them the maximum amount of choice (in terms of both devices and content) possible.

The iPod won’t die because it isn’t any less proprietary than the other devices paired with services out there. It may be relegated to second place, though, if Sony comes out with competing devices that also play downloadable movies. But unless all of these companies stop adhering to a battle-camp mentality where customers have to buy a Sony device in order to hear Sony content, or an Apple device to buy Apple content, etc., they will be fighting a losing battle. Consumers don’t care what company produced the content! They care only about the music (or movie). It’s inevitable that they will want to hear a substantial variety of music whose rights are owned by a variety of companies. Maybe in 20 or 30 years none of this will matter as more and more artists take the Indy route – especially if the trend continues of the content Giants not learning the lessons of history to adapt or hunker down and perish. But for the near future, anyway, this situation will just breed anger and a desire to defeat any restraint these companies want to put around the necks (ears?) of their customers.

Maybe Audible.com would be a good example for such companies. Audible.com provides downloadable audio books from a great number of publishers – either producing the recordings themselves or converting earlier books on tape or CD to their, yes, PROPRIETARY format. Yet, Audible has worked with many manufacturers since it’s inception in the late 90’s to make drivers for a huge number of devices. They didn’t just pick one brand and refuse to work with other companies because of some “strategic partnership.” And because of this one can listen to Audible.com content on Treo Cell phones and their competitor PocketPC phones, on Apple’s iPod, and on its competitor hard-drive based as well as flash memory MP3 players. Audible is now more successful than ever, at least if you view stock price as measure of success! True, Audible does not manufacture any devices themselves and this makes it easier for them to work with multiple manufacturers, whereas Apple offering iTunes for Sony devices would be creating more competition for their own iPod. But perhaps what this means is that companies should either sell the content that people want to hear or see, or they should make the devices, but not both. If they make both, there is just too much interest for them to create a firewall where they pair their device and content and make both incompatible with all other content and devices.