Fun with iPod Video – Part 1
Last month for my birthday I received one of the best gifts ever, a 60GB iPod Video. Since then I’ve been putting anything and everything on it. I’ve found a couple of great tools for converting most any video format to the MPEG4 required by the iPod. None of these are Windows tools so if that’s what you need you might as well look elsewhere.
First and bestest is HandBrake. It’s a GPL’ed tool for converting any DVD source to AVI, MP4, or OGM. It runs under OS X and Linux. I find it’s blazing fast under Linux. On a fast machine I can do a dualpass rip and convert of a 2 hour movie in about 30 minutes. All you need to do is download it and run the installer. You will need JAM(Just Another Make) installed on your Linux machine to use it.
Unzip the tar.gz to a directory
Go into the directory and run './configure'
After configure completes just run 'jam'.
Jam is sweet because it downloads and compiles all the tools you’ll need for ripping and encoding DVDs. Once it’s done compiling, running HandBrake is pretty simple. I’ve found the following command line does a good job and leaves very little artifacts in the videos when playing them on the iPod. It makes files that run about 250MB/hour.
./HBTest -i /dev/dvd -o /mp3/tmp/outputfiles01e01.ipod.mp4 -t 1 -a 1 -2 -d -r 29.97 -R 44100 -b 400 -w 320 -l 240 -f mp4
‘-i’ sets the input device
‘-o’ is the output file
‘-t’ is important to know. It’s the track number you want ripped. On most DVDs you want the first track. Run ‘./HBTest -i /dev/dvd -t 0’ to get a track listing.
‘-a’ is the audio track. You’ll usually want the first one. The others will be other languages or commentaries.
‘-2’ tells it to do a second pass to clean up the video. This is a good thing and doesn’t increase file size.
‘-d’ tells it to de-interlace. Not always needed but I do it anyways to be sure.
‘-r’ is the framerate. Anything from 5-29.97 is fine. I like smoother video so I set it at max. The savings in filesize of dropping the framerate is not huge I’ve found.
‘-R’ audio sample rate. Most folks need not fuss with this.
‘-b’ is the video bitrate. I find 400 to be a good middle ground. 1000kbps is max
‘-f’ is file type. Leave this at ‘mp4’ or your iPod won’t play it.
‘-w’ is picture width. 320 is max iPod supports and what you’ll want
‘-l’ is picture height. This is where things get tricky. Depending on the video source(4:3, 16:9, 2.35:1) you’ll need to change this. Most widescreen movies are 2.35:1 so you want to set -l to 180. For some movies and newer HD TV you’ll want 212. The rest, standard TV(4:3), you’ll use 240, the max the iPod supports. If you get the aspect ratio wrong your video can looked squished. Yes, you’ll get the black bars at top and bottom on widescreen stuff but you’ll be seeing the full picture.
Tomorrow I’ll show how to convert an existing AVI or other video file to run on your sparkly new iPod Video.