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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    I converted some movies to mp4 for an iPod using ffmpeg using the following command:
    Code:
    ffmpeg -i ~/Desktop/movie.vob -vcodec mpeg4 -b 700 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -r "24000/1001" -acodec aac -ab 128 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -s 320x180 -f mp4 -title "My Movie" ~/Desktop/movie.mp4
    I thought for sure they would play, but I was surprised by the error message that iTunes gave me: "This file was not copied, because it is unplayable on the iPod" (or something to that effect). I knew that I could use iTunes to re-encode it, but boy, is that slow!

    So here's what I did. I found a working mp4, called it movie.mp4. I copied that to the iPod, then I opened the iPod in the Finder, and searched the invisible folders for the one that was most recently modified. Inside that folder I found an mp4 with a seemingly random string of letters as the filename (such as, TAEWG.mp4). I copied that filename and deleted the file. Then I copied my movie into this folder and pasted the copied filename (TAEWG.mp4) onto this file.

    Then I went back to iTunes, and got Info on the placeholder movie.mp4, renamed it, ejected the iPod, and played the movie flawlessly.

    This may come in handy if you have a file that is "unplayable", but you don't want to re-encode. It's worth a try. Sure would be nice if it would just copy to the iPod from iTunes.[/code]
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  2. Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    What a great idea. It worked perfectly, though I forgot to switch out of auto-update mode so I had to reload the movie after it got erased, but in disc mode it seems to work fine. I wonder, too, why doesn't it copy in the first place? Anyway, thanks for the info!
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  3. Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    As it turns out, the reason some of my videos were "unplayable" is because the audio bitrate was too high (over 160kbps).
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