February 15, 2006

New iPod Lovin'

I've recently upgraded to a 60GB Video iPod from my ancient 2nd generation ipod, and am absolutely loving the thing. I've finally got 'on-the-go' playlists, shuffle songs that is actually random, and video functionality (which i hadn't really considered) turned out to be pretty damn cool.

After purchasing the apple a/v cable, I'm in the progress of converting a huge amount of video that i'll be able to watch anywhere. Well actually, i've converted some of it several dozen times so far. Finding the best encoder, codec, and settings turned out to be a little challenging, since i wanted pretty good quality on a TV *and* a reasonable file size—2500kbps was out of the question.

In the end i decided on ffmpeg (windows binaries) as the encoder with these settings:

Video

-vcodec xvid -s 512x384 -qscale 6 -g 300
The "xvid" codec turned out to produce much cleaner and smaller files than the "mpeg4", and plays on the ipod fine. Depending on content, I've increased the quality a bit, levels 4 and 5 are a fair bit smoother though file size jumps up considerably—I've done some of my faster moving music videos at these levels.

Audio

-acodec aac -ac 2 -ar 32000 -ab 48 -async 1
High passing frequencies above 16kHz and lowering the bitrate saves a huge amount of space. TV shows especially could go even lower, however I'm using shure e3c's and am quite sensitive to audio quality, and these were the lowest settings i was happy with. Incidentally, with the apple stock headphones 22050 & 32 or 40 was passable since they seem to roll off the top end anyway.

Misc

-f mp4
Makes sure the muxing is suitable for the ipod.

Once you've got the video converted, tagging it so the iPod sorts it nicely is another matter. iTunes [as of this writing] is completely unable to tag video files as TV Shows properly. It has a TV Shows setting, but it is ignored by the iPod. Fortunately there's a tool called Atomic Parsley, which was originally just for the mac, but windows as well.

One thing I've found really handy to do with my video tagging, is to put "Videos" in to the "Album" field for all my videos; movies, music and tv shows. The reason is iTunes treats videos just like songs and finding a handful of videos intermixed with them is a pain. With the album set to videos, you can just type "videos" in the search field to list all the videos on your iPod—sweet.

Here is an example of Atomic Parsley config I use, for a TV show:

--genre "TV Shows" --stik "TV Show" --artist "Seinfeld" --album "Videos" --year 1989 --TVShowName "Seinfeld" --TVEpisode "The Seinfeld Chronicles" --TVEpisodeNum 1 --TVSeasonNum 1 --title "The Seinfeld Chronicles" --writeBack

To get the video off your DVD's the best tool is DVD Decrypter, you'll have to google search for it as Macrovision (the makers of DVD encryption) under threat of lawsuit made them take the site down and remove the software. The last version was 3.5.4, and make sure you uncheck the "Check for Program Updates" under Settings > Events.

From the UI you can't extract more than one episode at a time in IFO mode (the mode you want to be using). However, from the console it's possible to write a batch script to extract them one after the other. Just add one line for each PGC with the switches below:

/MODE IFO /DEST F:\VIDEOS /VTS 1 /PGC 1 /START /CLOSE /SPLIT NONE /DIRECT 0x80 0xE0 /NAMING PGC

In closing, having all my video with my me is just as cool as having all my music. iPod's just seem to get better and better!

UPDATE: The information above has been superseded, please see the more recent post entitled: Step By Step Guide: Putting DVD's On To Your iPod

Posted by Matt at February 15, 2006 9:25 AM

Fraggle Chitter Chatter

UPDATE: I'm now also using MP4Box to spilt the video and audio tracks into separate MP4 files. This allows me to run the audio portion through AACGain (which only works with single stream audio MP4's) to normalize the volume of the movie sound tracks. In doing so the playback volume of every song and movie on my ipod is now the same!

Posted by: Matt at June 20, 2006 11:45 PM

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