Good compression settings for iPod videos

Hey Andrew Z, download and install FFMPEGX, drop the video in this and select your chosen output, then open the resulting file in Quicktime, export for Ipod and hey presto!, vid with sound. Put on headphones, watch video, tap foot in time to the music and wonder whether all this personal entertainment is alienating us all!

I have a problem with the new Quicktime 7.0. When i learned that i needed it to export the video files i have to ipod format, i did not really mind to much buying the entire program. Now the only problem i have with the quicktime is that when i play the videos on my ipod there is no audio. I looked up the problem on apple.com and it said that it could not do audio files that are "MPEG MUXED", i have no idea what that means or how to solve it. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to export my videos without losing the audio?

The only problem with a 3ivx encode in a .mov wrapper is the lack of metadata support. I wanted to use AtomicParsley to set tags in my video for use on the iPod. As far as I can tell, this only works on mpeg4 files.

I found that I can use the described compression settings above, then bring the .mov back into Quicktime and re-export it to mpeg4 to wrap it in an mp4 container. I set the audio and video to pass-through so there will be no transcode. Then I can edit the mp4 file in AtomicParsley and add my tags.

I found that Handbrake worked very well for converting videos, so if you can open the content there it's fairly fast compared to the quicktime pro encoder.
The settings I used were the following:
Codecs: H.264 Video/AAC Audio
Framerate: Same as source
Encoder: Baseline
Quality: 750kbps (or lower)
Picture Settings: Change the resolution to 320x240 (or whatever smaller than 240 if it's wide screen) - 320x240 is the max resolution, if it's larger I'm not sure what the iPod does but it will certainly affect battery life if it plays at all.

1 pass encoding (change to 2 pass if you want better quality, but much slower encoding).

Change the audio settings if you want, I just left them at 128kbps.

I got about an hour and a half or so down to around 250MB and it played really well on the computer, we'll see how it does on the iPod. On a dual G5 2.0 it encoded in around 15-20 minutes! I think a lot of it had to do with the 1 pass encoding, so if you see that option in any encoding program enable it, or disable 2 pass encoding.

First let me begin by thanking you for the very useful and easy to understand guide to compressing movies for the iPod. I've struggled with Videora and other conversion applications and this is seems to be the easiest way to go about doing it. Djones seems to have contributed a lot of useful information but seeing as I'm a beginner to all of this, I'm not able to interpret it and put it to good use.

I'll be using QuickTime Pro 7 to export my videos into an iPod ready state. Which codec should I use to achieve the best quality? I installed the 3ivx D4 4.5.1 codec and the quality seems acceptable but if I can have superior quality without considerably increasing file size then I'll take it!

Also, when adjusting the size of a video, how far are you supposed to bring it down? It seems to me you just sliced the resoltuion of your original video inhalf. Is this basically what we should do everytime? Simply divide the original resolution by two? If I have a final resolution after exporting a video from QTPro that exceeds the maximum resoltuion supported by the iPod, will the iPod size the video as necessary? In the compressor options there are several different choices for the 'encoder mode'. Should I leave this alone? Does this have any effect on the quality of the movie? Where do I adjust the movie's bitrate at? Is bitrate the same as datarate?

Lastly, what should my target bitrate be for my AAC Encoder settings? Djones mentioned that slacking up on the audio will decrease the filesize without creating a noticable decrease in quality. What bitrate should I bring it down to? About 128kbps?

Wow.. sorry for all of the questions. Hope it wasn't too much!

I have some video files that only play with VLC. QT7 pro can't play them (displays "movie contains some invalid data" -2010).

How can I convert them if QT7 won't open them?

well i use the program smart ripper to decode a dvd to a vts format that is perfect dvd quality then squeeeeeeeeze a 8 gig file into a 800meg file using videora

An important thing to remeber about encoding h.264 for the iPod is that you must use baseline encoding only. This involves clicking off 'mainline' as well as clicking on 'baseline' in the options in QT7. I myself use 480kbps h.264 on the video and 128kbps AAC on the audio. It's true encoding takes forever, but the results are worth it.

An aquaintance of mine came up with this for the sake of cross-platform compatibility...

http://www.dougplanet.com/2005/12/almost-universal-video-codec.html

I've tested it and it works great and pretty much everywhere, from PSPs to iPods, Palms and PCs.

You can set the h.264 size as wide as I want.

Or as wide as you want, heh.