I was playing with the video features in Caitlin’s new iPod and found it very easy to use QuickTime Pro to make iPod videos. For fun, I exported my OSCON “Building Liquid Websites with PHP” talk to the iPod (download, 139MB).

Strangely, the video is actually larger than my original version so I guess the sound encoding was bandwidth abusive or H.264 to H.264 transcoding wasn’t efficient. I should look into it in the future.

For those of you too cheap to use Quicktime Pro 7, there is there is a whole lot of software out there to make it easy and cheap.

I tried the recommended Podner program on a smaller file and it crashed on me. I tried the free iSquint and the file, when the resolution was reduced for iPod, came out too dark. Looks like you guys need a anti-aliasing algorithm, instead of using pixel averaging there.

This is a pity since there are a whole lot of other iPod video formats/resolutions that Quicktime Pro doesn’t allow me to access. I’ll probably look more into this in the future. For now, have some fun with the download above.

By the way, the compression (of the 50 minute talk) took a few hours on my 1.5Ghz Powerbook. On a 2x2Ghz PowerMac G5, smaller 2 minute clips went were very fast—around real-time speed. Much better than the “all night” Sean told me it took to compress his dance clips on his Mac Mini.

Anyone know of some Apple Compressor settings that will work? It’d be nice to be able to put this stuff into a pro workflow.