Alright, it's working. Still a bit setup-intensive, and still at-your-own risk. The interface is pretty slow and clunky (pause pushes audio out-of-sync, fast-forward/rewind remove audio altogether), but hey it's a hack.

- Downgrade your firmware to the iPodUpdate March '05 or earlier (should be on the CD-ROM that came with your photo). It will not work with 1.2 iPod software
- Download ipodlinux from here and follow the instructions exactly.
- Know your Key Combinations.
- Know that you can clean out linux without having to clean out your whole drive... probably. The info for that is here.

FYI, my 11 minute Brak episode is 874 MB. That's how much space raw video takes up.

Oh, one more thing. Since the iPod photo is FAT32 disk style for Windows, the largest filesize supported is 4GB. This means any single video file can't be longer than 52.5 minutes (assuming 1.3 MB / second).

All that being said, watching that Brak show episode on the bus today was pretty ace.

so im thinking about buying one of these now

I haven't, yet tried the video feature. I need someone to guide me to an "easy" program.

I have the black; unfortunately, it already has a couple of scratches -- oh well, I can live with that.

The sound & interface are amazing.


Anyone able to direct me to some "easy" program so that I can rip my DVDs onto it?

My 2 cents' worth,

audiobill

Check my link on the first page (DVD Encrypter / Videora), bill. Two downloads w/ graphic interfaces, and decent instructions w/ screenshots. Worked like a charm for Dalen.

So I bought a 4gb iPod nano, worked wonderfully for about two weeks and then tonight this started happening.

I plugged it into a USB port on my computer, and it started saying it is not compatible with firewire. Huh?! But it charges, so I just ignore it. Then I plug it in again to switch out some songs, and it says that the USB device plugged into my computer has malfunctioned. I unplug it, try to use the clickwheel and it is unresponsive.

Fiddle around with it some more, and waste no time in returning it to amazon. UPS is coming tomorrow to get it.

I'm getting one of the new video ones instead.

Wasn't this trick in Dale Carnegie's "how to win friends and influence people", under the heading: Making friends with seatmates and fuck the old bitch behind you?

For Dalen and anybody else using the Videora iPod converter, you may be interested in these tips that I posted on their forum:

Credit to mplayer's manual for these ideas.

For the MPEG-4 codec, use the following Custom FFMPEG flags to improve picture quality:
-mbd 2 -trell -cmp 3 -subcmp 3 -mbcmp 3

add these additional two to the front if the source is interlaced:
-ildct -ilme

If the source isn't interlaced, setting the fps to 23.976 will often improve continuity.

Keep in mind that resolution and bitrate reflect each other. A low bitrate will look worse on bigger resoultions, and higher bitrates aren't very efficient for smaller resolutions. Here's a guideline with calculations. What I do is calcuate ARc, set ResX to 480 (since I use MPEG-4) and CQ to .3, and backtrack from there to get ResY and Bitrate. Excel helps a lot with the calcs.

Cropping is your friend if the source has any black lines along the borders. It may mean customizing profiles, but it's worth it for compression and viewing.

For cropping and scaling, it's recommended to have the horizontal and vertical crops AND scaled resolutions at multiples of 16. For crops, this means a total at both ends (10 <-> 6, example).

For Windows, keep your final files under 4GB, so they will transfer. Given this compression rates, this normally shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks, Sketchyams.
I'm going to try it this weekend.

Cheers,
Bill

aaahhhh. VERY useful info colin. thanks.

Got my video iPod in the mail yesterday. Very nice so far. I thought the 4 gb nano would be enough, but I would've had to do too much switching out. Moving from 4gb to 30, I feel like I have all the space in the world now. I'm glad the nano fucked up on me!

Now let me get this straight, I download the Videora program, and I can convert say...my Arrested Development DVDs to watch on my iPod? That's possible? If so, I need to get on that.

Rockbox has started porting their firmware to iPod. If it's half as good as the job they've done for iRiver I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out.

i'm using xilisoft ipod video convertor. it's on oink and it's way better than videodora

Did you decide to get a Video ipod?

yea

Cool.

So... where do I get xilisoft if I'm not on oink?

More Videora converter tips:
- The audio limit is 160 kbps per channel. That means you can set your profile up to 320 kbps if you're transcoding in stereo. EDIT: They fixed this in 0.91, so it reflect the profile's number regardless of mono/stereo. Don't use anything over 160.

- more high-video quality custom options (have already posted some of these): -mbd 2 -mv0 -trell -cbp -precmp 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -preme 2 -naq -qns 2

- The resolution limit is total number of pixels, so the following are pixel setups will work for H.264 even though they are wider than 320 (bitrates are based on .3 bits per pixel at 29.97 fps).

16:9 - 580 kbps @ 336x192
1.85:1 - 607 kbps @ 352x192
2.35:1 - 632 kbps @ 400x176

i was gonna get one, but blew all my money on booze.

fuck i blew 130$ this weekend on cigarettes, booze and weed, now i have like 15$ for the next week

tell me aboot it. I just bought 'supplies' for Schoolies Week and now i be broke. Who woulda thought drugs would be so expensive in this day and age?

yeah i just finished uni on saturday (i had an exam on a saturday afternoon) so had to celebrate in style. My liver hurts a little though.

way better?

To be fair, videora isn't very user-friendly if/when it doesn't work. You get a "transcode complete" message in two seconds if there's an error, and you can only know what the error is if you turn on the debug console. Changing the frame-rate seems to distort the A/V sync over time (though there might be an option to fix that). AVI Synth should be a mandatory install to prevent people bitching that WMV files don't work because they haven't installed it because they didn't know it was necessary for WMV files. The official documentation is very basic, and AFAIK all of the support responses on the forum are from users such as myself.

It ain't perfect, but that's software for you especially with an 0.x release. When it works, though (which has been 95% of my attempts), it's pretty freakin' great.