Mini-review of my video iPod

Thursday morning, I bought a wickedly cool video iPod (black, 30gigs), after drooling over Steve Garfield’s Sean Gilligan’s new gadget (white) on Wednesday night. When the original iPod came out, a national columnist wrote that it looked like a device beamed back from the future.

Well, this baby looks like a toy from the 23rd century.

People keep guessing that it cost around $500 — nope, $299. The video iPod stores video, photos and music. The battery died in one of our original iPods, and I’d forgotten Apple’s trade-in offer: 10% off if you turn in an older model for recycling.

I don’t have time to do a full review here, so here’s a mini-review:

First and foremost, the video is sweet! The quality really rocks, with a bright screen that lets you watch video from almost any angle and no pixilation in the videos I uploaded. “Lost”? “Desperate Housewives” for a buck 99? No way, baby! So far, I’m watching only my videos and videos downloaded from Ourmedia.org.

As we say on Ourmedia, Steve Jobs, we’ll take your call now. We’ll give the iPod crowd free content.

Second, the iPod package just keeps getting cooler. Minimalist, sleek, matchbook-thin, it’s the first iPod you really can stick in your shirt pocket and not notice it’s there. An amazing job of engineering.

A few quibbles: After using FireWire for three years, it’s a large step-down to have to resort to USB 2.0. Instead of a 10-minute process to load music it took me over three hours the first time I sent the video iPod on its maiden voyage with video and music. I suppose they did it because a FireWire port would be wider than the device itself.

The new software that came with iPod seems incomplete. A folder for video, but none for photos, and no way to create one (I kept trying to create a Playlist, but it would only create one for music). I finally figured out how to load videos (Add to Playlists), but a lot of the software seems version 0.9. No photos folder in iTunes? Instead, you have to point to a single folder on your computer, remember which one you chose, and file all your iPod photos there.

Another quibble: You need to recharge the battery by plugging it into your computer’s USB 2.0 port. That’s just a pain in the neck. What happens when you’re on the road and nowhere near your desktop or laptop (if you have one)? Also, the charging process either takes longer or there’s a bug in the software. After my iPod was connected to my Powerbook for two hours last night, it said “Do Not Disconnect” because it was still charging. I did anyway — and the battery seems fully charged.

I haven’t figured out how to turn the dang thing off after playing a video. I’ve been having to go back to the Music folder, double-clicking the bottom touchpad, which needlessly launches a song before it shuts down the device. After three years they still can’t find a way to add an “off” switch?

I also haven’t figured out how to create video playlists — guess I’ll have to do further reading.

The directions that came with the iPod said that when you’re playing a video, you can click the right button to play the next video. Nope. That brings you back to the video directory.

The biggest irritation — solved only today — has been with the codecs. The video iPod supports H.264 (the wonderful new compression technology) and MPEG-4 and, apparently, QuickTime .mov files. I spent two hours encoding more than a dozen videos in H.264, loaded them into iTunes — and none of them showed up on my video iPod. Only the files I encoded in regular MPEG-4 showed up.

What the heck? Couldn’t find any information about this at first on the Apple site.

Today, Steve of Elbows on the Yahoo Videoblogging mailing list held out the answer:

The easiest way to make ipod compatible h264 is to use the export option in qt7.0.3 and select ‘Movie to ipod’ option. This will create a file that ends in .m4v but if you want to put it on the web, you should be able to rename it to whatever.mp4 rather than whatever.m4v and it will still work on web and ipod.

If you made the h264 that doesnt work using qt7 mpeg4 export option, rather than ipod export, here is the posible explanation:

ipod only supports baseline h264, qt7 probably set to do main & baseline, which won’t work. Try this….

Export to mpeg-4 in quicktime
select h264
set res to 320×240 or lower
set bitrate to 768 or lower
click video options then untick main and tick baseline
set audio to AAC
try encoding and see if it works.

Talk about obscure solutions! It worked for me — both by exporting from QuickTime 7.03 and by sharing from iMovie HD. It was the advanced “video options” that did the trick — something I never would have considered as the problem. Thanks, Steve!

Later: I came across this video iPod tutorial page on the Apple site, which instructs users using Quicktime 7.03 to Export “Movie to iPod,” which simplifies the process a bit.

And the iPod specs page says this: H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats. MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats.

Meantime, Mark Cuban had this recent blog entry about how Disney’s embrace of the video iPod may be a turning point for network television.

Technorati tags: iPod, video iPod, HonorTagJournalism

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.