Hey everyone. I’m getting an iPod video (it should be here on Friday), so I’m getting my iTunes library all set up, beforehand. I recently purchased some CD singles that come with 320x240 MPEG music videos on them, but iTunes won’t play them smoothly. (I’ve tested it on multiple computers, too.) The videos lag in iTunes, but they’re perfect in Quicktime. I have checked the videos, and the data rate isn’t too high, or anything that should cause problems.
So, my question is, does the iPod video (and iTunes) actually support regular MPEG files, or do they have to be MPEG 4 or the like? (I have software to convert the files to MPEG 4 or H.264 if I need to.) I googled around, but I didn’t see anything that says that iTunes and the iPod suppport regular MPEG files, so I may just have to convert the videos… (Something I’d rather avoid so I can save image quality.) So, could one of you iPod owners help me out, please?
Thanks for the links, bigbad. I’ve done some more research, and it appears that the iPod won’t play regular MPEG files, so I’ll have to convert mine to MPEG 4. If anyone needs a program to output iPod compatible files, either check bigbad’s links, or you can also use Videora iPod Converter, which uses FFMPEG. I’ve only used Videora so far, but it seems to be user friendly, and also fairly customizable in terms of what type of settings to use for outputting videos, and making output presets.
I tried playing an mpeg in itunes and it seemed to work ok though there was some lag when resizing and hovering over the window. I don’t use itunes as a media player and I’ve heard it’s generally not very good.
A good converter on the Mac is Visual Hub - it’s incredibly fast for mpeg-4 (not H264) encoding. It can do a whole DVD movie in 15 minutes. Videora looks like it will do the same thing on Windows.
