An Engadget “post”:1 turned me on to the “Videora iPod converter”:2, which is a handy little program to convert videos to .MP4 format which the video iPod can understand. I haven’t tried it out with a video iPod (I don’t own one), but it seems to work ok with my Windows Quicktime player.

In a nutshell, Videora converter is GUI front end to “FFmpeg”:3. Here’s the FFmpeg project description from SourceForge:

bq.. FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

The project is made of several components:

* ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It also supports grabbing and encoding in real time from a TV card.
* ffserver is an HTTP (RTSP is being developed) multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. Time shifting of live broadcast is also supported.
* ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
* libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performances and high code reusability.
* libavformat is a library containing parsers and generators for all common audio/video formats.

p. Update 2005-10-28:
Oh, “here’s”:4 another Engadget post on using “VLC”:5 to do the conversion. However, for some reason, I couldn’t get my Quicktime player to play the converted .MP4 file — probably due to operator error.

[5(The most excellent VLC media player homepage)]http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[4(Engadget on using VLC to convert videos for the iPod)]http://features.engadget.com/entry/1234000583063891/

[3(FFmpg page on SourceForge)]http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

[2(Videora iPod converter page)]http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/

[1(Engadget post on Videora and iPod video conversion)]http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000723066031/

Ok, the comment spam is getting a bit more thick, so my short-term solution is to moderate comments. If you do comment, it might take a couple of days before I get around to allowing it — I don’t check the comments to be moderated everyday.

In the long term, there are lots of solutions to comment spam. One of these days I’ll get around to figuring out which one is best. In the meantime, comments will have some latency.

-The Management