iPod Classic Questions

[guns1inger]

I am about to acquire an 80Gb iPod Classic. It is costing me nothing, which is good, because I cannot justify parting with over AU$300 for one. The music side is straight forward, however the video side has raised a few questions. I know the codec and container restrictions, and have been looking at a few programs for conversion, including WinFF and Videora. The questions that have arisen, for anyone who has one of these and can answer them, are :

1. WinFF has an anamorphic encoding setting. Does the iPod respect this when playing back on it's own screen, or only externally ?

2. All the encoders seem to want to convert the video to 29.970 fps. If this because of the iPod, or because these are predominantly US centric in origin, and therefore narrow minded about format ?

Any help would be appreciated.

Also, any general comments about the 6g classic from owners. Happy to hear the good, bad or indifferent experiences you may have had.

[dLee]

The family gave me an 80GB iPod Classic for Christmas. I didn't ask for it and I didn't think I needed one, but I've had a good time with it now that it's here.

I use Videora to convert video that I've capped, which is mostly single MPEG2 files from my AIW9800 Pro. A lot of it is 16:9 letterboxed in 4:3 format. The iPod screen is 4:3, so AR is maintained. Sometimes these converted captures show up in the iPod shifted left a few pixels, slightly cutting off the left side of the 16:9 letterbox. I haven't had time (yet) to chase down the cause.

I use DVDFab Platinum to transcode commercial DVD's that I own. I only buy widescreen versions and in the several I've done AR is maintained without me changing any settings.

If you want to play video externally, you will need to buy an adapter that costs here $50 USD. This is a new "feature" with the Classic. That's $50 USD for composite and $50 USD for component. You could play composite out through the headphone jack via an AV connector with earlier models.

The Classic has the ability to change from NTSC to PAL (Videos|Settings|TV Signals). This may only affect the external TV out, but I haven't experimented because of the cost of the adapters.

I find the MP3 compression on the music tiring, but if you don't have anything else, it's passable.

[guns1inger]

Apparently the older universal dock with s-video out still works with the classic - if you can find one. This gives better output than the new composite connector, although it will also depend a lot on the quality of the encoding as to how much difference it will really make.

Videora does have a few more profiles than WinFF, and they are more easily edited. This includes 25 fps, amongst other things, so I will do a couple of test conversions while waiting for this thing to turn up.

Thanks for the reply.

[dLee]

I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the highly compressed iPod video when displayed on a hotel TV through composite - using my daughter's iPod, which is an original 80GB model.

It's not too bad - watchable from a distance.

I've got a couple of PAL dvd's ripped to one of my external HD's. If I were to encode a small test clip with Videora, which settings, aside from 25 fps, would you be interested in?

[guns1inger]

I have been playing with Videora (I use it at work to convert videos for access via our intranet), and have done some test encodes at various bitrates (768 has noticeable blocking at 640 x 360). The issue I have now is what will play correctly, and what wont. So I guess I would be looking at 25 fps, 16:9 anamorphic - as that is what most of my video will be.

[GMaq]

Hi,
Try this:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic344379.html

It is based on the iPod presets I did for WinFF except it is better for a Windows iPod environment because it muxes with NicMP4Box and thus satisfies iTunes stupid penchant for a uuid atom in the .mp4 container.

If you prefer 25fps you will need to edit the presets in the transcoding.ini file.

[guns1inger]

Thanks for that. I have played with the ini file and created a few new options. I will do some encoding later tonight and see what I get.

[halsboss]

Videora does have a few more profiles than WinFF, and they are more easily edited. This includes 25 fps, amongst other things, so I will do a couple of test conversions while waiting for this thing to turn up.

It is based on the iPod presets I did for WinFF except it is better for a Windows iPod environment because it muxes with NicMP4Box and thus satisfies iTunes stupid penchant for a uuid atom in the .mp4 container.

If you prefer 25fps you will need to edit the presets in the transcoding.ini file.

Hi, I understand these are based on FFMPEG under the covers ? Any chance of replying with the actual generated ffmpeg commandlines ... please ?

[guns1inger]

You can download 3GP iPod Converter from the link gmaq provided (above) and look at the transcoding.ini file for all the commandline presets he uses.

WinFF shows you the command lines in the Preset Editor

[guns1inger]

@GMaq - I have also just updated the presets to 4 threads, which has doubled the processing framerate on my Core2Quad, however it is still substantially slower than Videora. The quality on a 2 pass encode is very good though. File size is smaller but the quality appear to be close to the same.

[GMaq]

guns1inger,

Nice Work, that's interesting to know, The 9017 ffmpeg build in there is getting a little long in the tooth, I haven't bothered updating it because it still works well and I'm too busy to play with newer builds and change the syntax.

One thing i have been fooling around with is 1-pass CRF (essentially like XviD CQ) so far the results have been quite promising, The fun is finding a good enough quality quantizer that doesn't overshoot the 1500kbps ceiling for the iPod. If I get it together I will probably put it up for download, perhaps we could co-ordinate a PAL and NTSC version on the same download? I'm sure someone with your experience could only make it better.

@halsboss

WinFF presets are simple XML files, There are a lot of extra presets at the WinFF forum in the presets section, you should be able to download them and view them with notepad or firefox to get the command lines. As for the included presets in WinFF it just as guns1inger said.

[guns1inger]

Having a few problems -

anamorphic didn't do what I expected (take a widescreen video and encode it as anamorphic) and does some funky cropping.

I queued a half dozen vids to encode over night. They were a mix of widescreen and fullscreen, and I made sure I changed the presets before dropping each video into the queue - they all encoded as anamorphic, which was the setting being used for the video encoding when the queue was created. It ignored all other preset changes.

Just attempted a solo widescreen encode. The process ran - progress bar ran twice across the screen - the process ended and the program stopped, but . . . . no video in the output folder.

[GMaq]

OK,

As you previously guessed my little 3GP hack is NTSC -centric, I kind of did it for myself and when it worked well I put it up for download. The anamorphic cropping is a quick n' dirty crop of 60 pixels top and bottom so a 720x480 2.35-2.40 aspect ratio DVD is cropped and converted into a 640x272 H.264 file. Probably the cropping doesn't work well with PAL sources, Once again editing the "-croptop" "-cropbottom" values in the transcoding.ini should fix it. If in doubt just use the regular widescreen presets, you aren't wasting many bits on encoding the letterboxes anyway.

As far as the batch encoding, I rarely use it myself and usually opt to do multiple files of the same resolution when I do use it.

Sometimes I will go into the 3GP folder and delete any ffmpeg.exe stackdump and x264passlog files, because they become quite large over time, and are freshly created with each encode anyway, perhaps this is why your solo encode failed.