Getting Video into the iPod Video

'Tis the season where an inordinate amount of giving and receiving is going on, so it's a safe bet that many of you out there will be either gifting or getting a shiny new iPod video this year. And while the audio side of the equation is well established and largely dead simple by now, getting video you may already have lying about to play on the iPod isn't quite as mainstream just yet. Fortunately, it's not terribly difficult, so may we present a brief overview of what you need to know.

Here comes the science

Well, what passes for science on these pages, anyway. Theoretically, there's no magic to transcoding video for the iPod, since Apple is quite forthcoming about the video specs of the new iPods. In a nutshell, you can encode to MPEG-4 video or to Apple's flavor du jour, the snappily named H.264. Here's a quick rundown of the maximum settings for either one:

H.264

• File formats: .m4v, .mp4 or .mov
• Video data rate: 768 Kbps
• Profile: Baseline
• Frame size: 320 x 240
• Frame rate: 30 frames per sec.
• Audio data rate: 160 Kbps
• Audio sample rate: 48 Khz stereo

MPEG-4

• File formats: .m4v, .mp4 or .mov
• Video data rate: 2.5 mbps
• Profile: Simple
• Frame size: 480 x 480
• Frame rate: 30 frames per sec.
• Audio format: AAC-LC
• Audio data rate: 160 Kbps
• Audio sample rate: 48 Khz stereo

Again, those numbers represent the maximum, so you can certainly scale down as desired and the iPod will still play back the clip happily. Now, with those requirements, just about any program capable of compressing to either straight MPEG-4 or the slightly fancier H.264 format should be able to do the job.

MPEG-4 v. H.264

We're at the point now where a fundamental question presents itself: which codec is better? The answer is an unambiguous one: it depends. If you want to retain higher data and frame rates (which should help when you route the iPod's video signal through a TV), use MPEG-4. H.264 does very well at lower data rates, however, so it's a great choice if you need smaller files with pretty good image quality. The other trade-off is speed: H.264 takes eons to encode, while MPEG-4 is significantly faster. So if you have a lot of clips to burn through, MPEG-4 may be a better choice.

Now that we have that settled (more or less), it's worth mentioning that some encoding programs can be tripped up on a technicality, such as only supporting the H.264 Main Profile instead of the Baseline Profile the iPod requires. So let's look at a few programs that can fill the bill and produce iPod-capable clips. I'm going to start with Apple's own QuickTime Pro to show you the ropes, but then we'll move on to a couple of freebies that will handle a wider range of input formats.

QuickTime Pro

First, the downside: QuickTime Pro is $30. Making the requisite mental leap, which I am sometimes capable of, that means it ain't free. But there are probably more than a handful of you out there that have gone Pro for your QuickTime needs, and if you have, you already have a major, cross-platform, and (most importantly) simple tool for converting video for the iPod. It's also a nice, simple way to illustrate the settings you'll need to look for regardless of the program you ultimately choose to do the heavy lifting.

So fire up the QuickTime Player, open up your movie clip of choice, and select File:Export from the menu. The easiest thing to do is to simply select the Movie to iPod option (fig. 1).

Figure 1

What you get out of that is a 320x240 H.264-based clip, ready to go, so you can simply stop reading right here. If your clip can be opened in the QuickTime Player, and you want the easiest path possible, that's all you have to do. It's so simple you're not even allowed to dig into the Options box (it's grayed out and unclickable). However, if you want a little more flexibility (like being able to set the data rate, control the video codec, or scale the clip differently for widescreen aspect ratios, etc.), you'll need to fiddle with the settings a bit.

So let's try this again. With your chosen clip open in QuickTime Player, head for the Export panel, this time selecting the Movie to MPEG-4 option. From here, you can export out to whatever part of the iPod video spec you want to target. The settings may seem a little arcane, but if you just use the following screen captures as your guide, you should be A-OK. First up, let's take a gander at some settings for a plain ol' MPEG-4 video (fig. 2):

Figure 2: Sample settings for MPEG-4 video

Remember, you have a lot more leeway with MPEG-4 video than you have with H.264, so go as nuts as you want with the data rate (up to 2.5 mbps) and the frame size (up to 480x480). Now, there are three things that you'll want to pay attention to:

1. Up at the top, make sure MP4 is selected as the File Format,
2. the Video Format needs to be set to MPEG-4 Basic, and
3. the Audio Format must be AAC-LC.

If you do those three things, and keep within the data rate and frame size limits, you'll be fine. Now, what about H.264? Just a few tweaks of the same panel are all you need (fig. 3):

Figure 3: Sample settings for H.264 video

The Audio settings are the same as in Figure 2, so I left those out. Here are the areas to watch out for when encoding to H.264:

1. The Video Format needs to be H.264 (obvious, I know), and
2. you need to click the Video Options button and set the Restrict Profile(s) boxes to Baseline only.

Now, you don't have as high a data rate (up to 768 kbps) or frame size (up to 320x240) to work with as you do when encoding to regular MPEG-4, so keep that in mind. Anyway, that's pretty much it. QuickTime Pro makes converting video to the iPod format very simple. BUT...

What if you need to convert a common video type, such as DIVX or even plain MPEG-1, that QuickTime Pro can't export properly (or even, by default, open at all)? You may need to look for alternate programs that are a little more flexible in terms of what formats they can deal with. Programs that export specifically to iPod format are popping up all over the place, but since I'm a big fan of the freebies, that's what we'll stick to.

Mac options

Two freeware programs on the Mac are worth mentioning. The first, MPEG Streamclip, is one I've already taken a shine to in an earlier article, and is proving itself yet again as a multi-purpose encoding utility. First of all, it will handle just about any format you throw at it (QuickTime, DIVX, MPEG-1, and even WMV with the Flip4Mac components), and if you have the $20 Apple MPEG-2 Playback component installed, you can even convert unencrypted MPEG-2 and VOB files found on DVDs. Second, it's been recently updated (to version 1.51, to be exact) to add a really simple iPod video conversion button. Just open your clip, select Convert to MPEG-4 from the File menu, click the iPod button (fig. 4), and you're set.

Figure 4

All the tweakable settings are also right there, so if you're not happy with the defaults, just fill in the various fields with the settings we've been getting familiar with. Some of the extras are really nice too, especially the ability to deinterlace footage and to crop the edges of the frame, which comes in handy if you have clips that come from a PVR (for example) which may have garbage edges.

In the "honorable mention" category is a relative newcomer, iSquint. It's a nice, compact utility that pretty much exists only for iPod video conversion (fig. 5). Drag a clip (or series of clips) into iSquint, choose "Optimize for iPod," select a quality setting, and hit Start. If you want, you can also override the default quality settings and enter your own options in the handy slide-out drawer.

Figure 5

iSquint is off to a great start (the batch conversion and format support are already excellent), but it only gets honorable mention status for now because of a few glaring issues. One, H.264 support isn't yet included. Two, the interface is somewhat unpolished, acting awkwardly when you want to override the defaults. Three, I'm not sure what the purpose of the "Optimize for TV" option is yet, since it produces MPEG-4 clips that are of a higher data rate and frame size than the iPod allows. But iSquint is definitely usable right now, and should only get better.

A Windows option

I'm not a big Windows dude, but I was able to find a pretty nice (and free) utility that should appeal to our Windows-using friends: Videora iPod Converter, which I'll just call ViC from here on out (fig. 6).

Figure 6

Like the Mac programs mentioned earlier, ViC also handles clips in all manner of formats (MPEG, QuickTime, VOB, unprotected Windows Media, etc.). However, since it only can compress to MPEG-4 and H.264, it's not really suitable as a general-purpose compression utility. The batch conversion function is nice, but it's not a simple drag-and-drop—you have to start a clip and then manually begin other conversions to add them to the queue. ViC comes with a default 1-click setting, which makes conversion very simple, and you can also add your own specific settings to handle widescreen clips or alternative data rates and set any one of those as the 1-click default. I did have a few issues with certain QuickTime codecs and WMV conversion, but despite that, ViC itself is a perfectly fine (and pretty fast) iPod video utility for Windows users.

Transferring to the iPod

Whichever program you end up using to convert your video to iPod format, you still have to get it into the iPod itself for playback. While this seems the obvious portion of our program today, it never hurts to do a quick rundown. You'll need iTunes 6, of course, since earlier versions can't handle video. So fire up iTunes 6, and drag your clips into the Library. Once you have clips in iTunes, they show up in the Video window (fig. 7).

Figure 7

Now, depending on how you've set your iPod update options, you have a few choices for how your clips actually make it over to your iPod:

• If you manually manage your playlists, you can just select clips and drag them into the iPod icon.
• If iTunes is set to update everything automatically, any videos in the Video window will get moved over during the next update (provided you have enough free space on the iPod, of course).
• If iTunes only updates selected lists, it's a good idea to set up a dedicated video playlist that gets copied to the iPod (fig. 8).

Figure 8

Once all your clips have been copied over, you're good to go (fig. 9):

Figure 9: This picture stinks, but you get the idea. These new iPods are really reflective and hard to photograph in action...

So there you have it

Since you've already dropped a bundle on your shiny new iPod, it's good to know that you don't need to flitter away any more dough just to get video into it. All that's required is some time and perhaps a little patience. Hopefully, you have some idea by now of how to format existing video for the iPod, and once you've selected your encoding program and have worked through a couple of clip tests, the process should go from potentially confusing to relatively painless. So good luck, and enjoy your new iPod-based video library!

Filed under: Tutorial on December 12th, 2005

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