New iPod Time… Fun Getting Videos To Play March 1, 2006
I waited until the Apple “Special Event” happened yesterday before buying an iPod - a “proper” video model would have been nice, as that’s going to be my primary use for it, above and beyond music, but hey, this does the job. Both Katy and Ant made comments in the “This Week…” post, regarding the black iPod vs. the white one; I think I was already leaning towards the black one anyway, so that was easy. It’s disappointing that the “official” accessories are still primarily white, though. I imagine I’ll go hunting eventually, and get the co-ordinated stuff, but I was in a one-stop-shop mode yesterday, so my shiny new black iPod also has shiny white a/v cables, a universal dock, and a camera attachment. Ah well.
I like the looks of the new Mac Mini too… I could be tempted to put one of those in my lounge as a media system - not media necessarily in the “Windows Media Center Edition” sense, as I don’t need a tuner, etc., but media as in a dedicated, quiet, low-profile system to run iTunes and so forth. Have to do some thinking, and see how the initial reviews on it turn out… It’s all HP’s fault - they gave me an iPod shuffle as a giveaway a while back, and slowly, more and more Apple gear is creeping into my home and life.
A “customer comment” note, however - Apple, whoever decided to use something in the order of two-point text for the serial number on the back of the iPod… Thanks. Thanks a lot. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed finding something to magnify the text with, and then dealing with the reflective back surface of the iPod while trying to read that serial number… I can’t tell you how much fun that was! (I know, sarcasm is low humor. Sometimes I can’t help it!).
After setting up the iPod, I dropped a couple of video files over to it, using 3GP_Converter, as pointed out to me by Ant, here. I immediately realised that I was having the problem he then talks about, but unlike him, I didn’t have an older version of firmware to downgrade to. Hmmm… Anyway, thanks to the posts over at iLounge here, and the more organized sticky-thread I went with the general view that this wasn’t really a bug, but more a change in acceptable tolerances for MPEG wrappers. So, off to find software that would convert my existing AVI files and so forth. And free is always good.
I ended up using Videora (that’s a direct link to the EXE, folks) after reading the PSP 9 forums. Initial testing looks good, taking about 15 minutes per one hour AVI recording. Still figuring out the “best” settings for the program, but the main point is that I can now readily drop video to the iPod again, and the sound doesn’t drop off after thirty seconds.
‘course, simple as all that above sounds, it happened after I’d spent a couple of hours trying different ways to get the 1.1 firmware to play the 3GP_Converter generated files. I’ve now got an iPod called “IPOD” on my computer, and I’ll have to go googling later to figure out how to change that.