Converting Videos for iPod
Before going straight to mencoder or ffmpeg (the normal behavior on a Linux system) in order to convert videos on my Mac, I decided to look around and see what else might be out there. I happened across an old post from Engadget that describes using VLC to convert Tivo recordings for use with the iPod. Fantastic, VLC was already my video player of choice, I just didn’t know it converted videos to MPEG4 as well. Now it’s like doubly the coolest bit of video software out there!
I keep thinking that at some point I’ll stop using the iPod and just put the videos on my E61, but it’s still a cumbersome process to do stuff like that. The Nokia Podcasting software doesn’t work for me. I’m never in the same place, and I want it to download over wifi not GSM. I can’t get that working consistently. And even when I give up and tell it to use GSM, the client still hangs up and I need to go in and kick it and prod it and coax it into actually downloading what I want. Blech, not interested.
I was fooling around with the ZuCasts stuff from Shozu, but I couldn’t get that working consistently even with the channels out there already. Usually it says ‘unsupported video” or something of the sort, and then it kinda played part of one video and I had problems with it. Pull the battery out to regain control of my handset problems. And then yesterday it told me I had a new ZuCast and I didn’t even have the app running. Which is kinda sweet in a “wow, that’s magical” way, but also scary in exactly the same way. So I put that aside for now and will have to come back to it later.
Which leaves pretty much just transferring the videos over via bluetooth as the only valid option if I were to get them encoded. So if I’m going to restrict myself to transferring things while the device is in the same general area as my computer, I might as well transfer it to the one that does the transfer in seconds over USB and has 60 gig of storage instead of the one that does it at about 700kbps and has 2 gig of storage.
Would seem like some simple over the air sync between my phone and a bunch of my videos living out somewhere on the internets would be achievable with just some basic free bits of stuff. I’m willing to take care of the most of the issues: turning normal video into 3gp and putting it up somewhere on the network. Does the built in SyncML client on the Nokia allow for just keeping a file store in sync some way? I’ve been meaning to dig at SyncML for a while… might this be the thing that actually gets me to do it? Any SyncML folk out there know the capabilities included in the SyncML client that Nokia installs on the E61?
February 26th, 2007 at 4:04 am
Hi Mike,
Sorry to hear about the trouble you’ve been having with ShoZu ZuCasts. Which model handset were you using? I see you have an E61, is this the one? Unfortunately, it is not listed as supported as yet because it is still waiting to go through our testing and qualification process. In the meantime, you can try launching ZuCast videos in the native RealPlayer instead of the built in ShoZu player. To do this, highlight the video you’d like to watch in ShoZu and instead of clicking on it, choose Options > Open instead and this will launch RealPlayer.
Hope this helps in the meantime.
Best,
Mark
support@shozu.com
February 26th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Aha! Well that certainly explains it, I was trying it from my E61. Thanks for pointing it out Mark, I’ll definitely give it another shot once the E61 is official.
December 27th, 2007 at 9:59 am
[...] been using VLC to convert videos for my iPod for a while, but recently had started having issues. Like one video stops playing after 45 minutes of an hour [...]