Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I’ve 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 and a half long movie (something I discovered while on the road trying to watch it, very frusterating), others fall out of sync between audio and video even though they play fine when played on my computer, and others get into a loop some ways into playback with either the audio or video stuttering until I turn the playback off.

VLC still seems to be one of the recommended ways to consistently convert videos for iPod usage though, why is no one else having issues? I made sure I had the most recent version of VLC installed and tried to convert the videos again, and had either similar or at least equally frustrating issues. Then I figured maybe it was an odd quirk or the OS X versions, so I took the videos over to my nice fresh Ubuntu system and did the conversion there. Still no dice. I even went and installed the Medibuntu repositories and let it upgrade anything that could be even vaguely related. Still ended up with files that didn’t run through all the way.

Finally I ended up giving iSquint a try. It runs ffmpeg underneath it looks like. And sure, it’s pretty naggy about trying to get me to upgrade to some paid version of the software, but at least the videos it’s created so far play all the way through.

What are other folks using? Say you have a bunch of vidoes downloaded from the internet that you would like to be able to watch on the go, how do you do it. I used to go for downloading them from video.google.com if there was a download for PSP/iPod option, but that feature seems to be screwed up pretty frequently recently. iSquint is nice, but I want a command line converter. Should I just dig out the right options to use for ffmpeg and run it myself? Last time I checked ffmpeg supported a lot fewer formats as input than VLC does, which was why I switched in the first place. Or is there an “iPod happy” version of VLC floating around that I just haven’t run across yet?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.