What's the best way to keep my iTouch fed with video?

December 9, 2008 8:46 AM

What's the best solution on Vista for transcoding video for an iPod Touch?

I recently received an iPod Touch (16gb) as a birthday present, and while I've had pretty good luck converting various divx/xvid/mp4/mkv files using Handbrake on my MacBook Pro, I'd rather set this up on my (shudder) Vista machine at home, as my existing itunes library already lives there. Ideally, I'd like to be able to rip a dvd or two now and then, which I know isn't supported by the windows version of Handbrake.

posted by Oktober to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

You can just run DVD Decrypter, then use Handbrake like you normally would.
posted by 0xFCAF at 8:55 AM on December 9, 2008

I would recommend MeGUI over Handbrake; it's more work initially but runs much faster on my Vista machine and is much more versatile in terms of cropping, resizing, inverse telecine, denoising, etc. MeGUI is also Avisynth-based, meaning you can feed it nearly any source and filter it with auto-previews before encoding.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 9:03 AM on December 9, 2008

I used to have all sorts of problems with Handbrake but the newest version works like a charm on Vista.
posted by mattholomew at 10:09 AM on December 9, 2008

For DVD ripping to portable/console formats, my favorite is DVDfab.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:46 AM on December 9, 2008

Actually, Handbrake just released a new version in the past few days, and I've ripped 2 or 3 DVDs with no problem.
posted by owtytrof at 12:23 PM on December 9, 2008

Also, I'm ripping these specifically to watch on my iPod Touch during my daily commute. The iPod Touch preset is pretty good, unless you're watching something that's overall very dark. In that case, you get a fair amount of blocking in the black areas. It doesn't bother me enough to try to fix it, though.
posted by owtytrof at 12:27 PM on December 9, 2008

I 2nd DVDfab. It has presets for all sorts of portable devices and its simple to use.
posted by aGee at 12:35 PM on December 9, 2008

I've used mediacoder on a number of occasions. Its done the job. I'm just checking out handbrake now that it can transcode most file types.
posted by gergtreble at 1:14 PM on December 9, 2008

Well, mixed success so far with handbrake on windows. A lot of the .wmv files I throw at it don't transcode properly.
posted by Oktober at 4:57 PM on December 9, 2008

Well, mixed success so far with handbrake on windows. A lot of the .wmv files I throw at it don't transcode properly.

Handbrake uses ffmpeg to import some kinds of media, and unfortunately ffmpeg doesn't properly decode all of WVC1 or WMV9.

While I'm here, I'll point out that DVDFab is 1) shareware and 2) violates the GPL in its use of libavcodec/libavformat/libavutil from the ffmpeg/mplayer project.

Mediacoder 1) is a broken piece of crap 2) violates the GPL in its use of ffmpeg and 3) violates the licenses of numerous other encoders distributed with it.

Check out various Windows encoder GUIs here; I'm partial to MeGUI because I use it and it includes iPod presets, but some of the others may be worth a try.
Note that AutoMKV is a broken piece of crap, BENCOS doesn't do iPod video yet, and SX264 is so new that there isn't a consensus on how well it works. You can use Avidemux to encode with a lot more manual intervention but you're stuck with the low-quality FAAC audio encoder and you have to check iPod Touch compatibility against other encoders' profiles.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:37 PM on December 9, 2008