What's the best program to encode High Quality videos for the ipod touch?

[mikayd]

What's the best program to encode High Quality videos for the ipod touch ?

What's the best freeware program and Pay Program ?

I'm going to get me a touch this week and I want to know what others are using to encode videos and movies.

All Suggestions are welcomed Thanks In Advance.

[Baldrick]

A x264 frontend like Handbrake or xvid4psp or maybe ipodme. Use the ipod profiles.

[lordsmurf]

Best for payware? MainConcept Reference.

[orsetto]

Handbrake is the best, and its free/shareware, but its slower than death: if you want to rip a lot of stuff quickly before traveling, forget it. I find CloneDVDMobile the most useful payware: it isn't cheap, but its lightning-quick with results I found surprisingly watchable even on a 50" screen in a hotel room. The only seriously annoying drawback with CloneDVDMobile is it sometimes screws up lipsync. Theres no predicting what material will cause this, and the developers have been trying to fix it for years to no avail. I can go long stretches without a problem, but it reliably occurs when ripping certain commercial TV season discs. I've learned to live with it when I'm in a hurry, on the iPod screen it isn't all that noticeable, but if I have the time I'll usually rip TV discs using handbrake instead. CloneDVDMobile generally does fine ripping DVDs recorded with my own hardware, and most commercial movie releases, its the studio TV-On-DVD stuff that can trip it up.