[mythtv-users] new video2ipod script released!

[Jeff Simpson]

> You use FFMPEG? I did some testing and prefer the quality of Mencoder
> better. I know they use alot of the same libraries, but for some reason
> mencoder seems to produce a better output.

I liked mencoder better, too. I actually started this mission by using
"podencoder", a script which uses mencoder. It's nice because it will
read any file mplayer will read.

For whatever reason, though, I was unable to get 720x480 output to
work on the iPod using mencoder, but it worked fine when using ffmpeg.
I suspect it's a matter of figuring out which strange options the iPod
requires.

> What bitrate do you use?

For mpeg4 it's configurable up to 2500kbps, and for h264 it's up to
1500kbps. Both of those are the max that the iPod will support by
default. What I found strange is that when I reduced the bitrate, the
filesize and encode speed didn't drop all that much, so I didn't see
much point in dropping the bitrate. At 2500kbps for mpeg4, I'm seeing
about 1gig/hour. It's a lot bigger than the typical divx/xvid movie,
but to have a video that looks great both on the screen and on the
iPod is pretty nice.