HowTo: Encode Video for iPod Video

[endersshadow]

If playtime is not set, I could not sroll (forward / backward) at all.
The display on ipod is always 0:00 and 0:00 when playtime not set.

When playtime is set, it shows the correct run-time at left, and the total play-time at right, as usual song playing would display.

Thanks.

Vincent

Right, this is to be expected, but does the video play all the way through without interruption?

[Vincent_Lin]

As I described in previous post, video will pause a brief moment (10-15 seconds), and it resumes without audio. Just scroll a tick or 2 (forward 1 or 2 seconds) will bring back audio, sort of like the old days when software DVD players runs out of sync of video/audio, but a pause or forward/rewind brings it back in sync.

Short video does not have this behaviour (2:35).

Those videos that have these behaviour are all full feature movies (around 2 hours) encoded from DVDs. A relatively short film (Glenn Gould Plays Goldberg Variations) with runtime about 58 minutes has this problem too.

All these videos when played on ipod show the current-run-time and total-run-time properly, after play-time information is added, updated, and sync-ed. Scroll forward/backward updates current-run-time correctly as well.

Thanks.

Vincent

[endersshadow]

As I described in previous post, video will pause a brief moment (10-15 seconds), and it resumes without audio. Just scroll a tick or 2 (forward 1 or 2 seconds) will bring back audio, sort of like the old days when software DVD players runs out of sync of video/audio, but a pause or forward/rewind brings it back in sync.

Short video does not have this behaviour (2:35).

Those videos that have these behaviour are all full feature movies (around 2 hours) encoded from DVDs. A relatively short film (Glenn Gould Plays Goldberg Variations) with runtime about 58 minutes has this problem too.

All these videos when played on ipod show the current-run-time and total-run-time properly, after play-time information is added, updated, and sync-ed. Scroll forward/backward updates current-run-time correctly as well.

Thanks.

Vincent

I'm going to level with you: I'm totally befuddled...I haven't had the problem nor can I reproduce it, so I haven't been able to play around with it

All apologies...mayhaps someone with more expertise can help...

[endersshadow]

I've updated the HowTo with instructions on how to install the XML Parser and libgpod, and I've updated the install script and Wiki accordingly.

All should be well in iPod Video land

[rdwtux]

Hi, thanks for the great howto.

There seems to be an error with the install script for ipodvidenc. line 148 and 150 (think that's them) have "if <blah> then;" rather than "if <blah>; then"

I changed it in my copy and all is well. Cept know I'm having dependency hell.. but I'll keep working on that.

[endersshadow]

Thanks for the info...it's fixed.

BTW, what dependency problems are you having? Hopefully, I can solve them all via the install script, so then people wouldn't have any problems in the future.

Thanks again!

[rdwtux]

I was having huge dependency problems with mpeg4ip so i compiled from source. Compiling from source seems to have worked for mpeg4ip but FFMPEG is failing now.

me@localhost:~/$ sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Build-dependencies for ffmpeg could not be satisfied.

If I skip this step, configure works fine for ffmpeg but then make fails with a syntax error:

dtsdec.c: At top level:
dtsdec.c:315: error: ‘dts_state_t’ undeclared here (not in a function)
dtsdec.c:315: error: syntax error before ‘)’ token
make[1]: *** [dtsdec.o] Error 1
make: *** [lib] Error 2

I think automatix might be the root cause of most of my problems.

I also noticed that in the instructions it didn't say to change the name of libgtkpod-0.3.0 to libgtkpod.

[rdwtux]

OK so it's definately conflicts caused by automatix.

Had to install the following packages via synaptics - removing all conflicts:

libdts-dev
libtheora-dev
libgsm1-dev
libraw1394-dev

Then go back and re-run:

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg

Then just keep following instructions. I also had to change the recommendation of ffmpeg's version number. The doc recommends 1.0xxxxx.. i almost immediately got a prompt to update my ffmpeg from ubuntu repositories to 3:0.1cvsxxxxx... so i changed my custom version to "3:1.0csv_custom"

Also, the ffmpeg binaries were installed in /usr/local/bin but the ipodvidenc script looked for them in /usr/bin. so I sym linked all 3 binaries.. but not the best way to do it. The configure should specify the prefix.

[pestilence4hr]

Don't have an iPod Video, just an iPod Photo. And I don't feel like ponying up another $300

Your howto was useful for me to get the latest version of GTKPod running though... the older one was a bit buggy.

Well, I finally got the windows machine in front of me to test it myself. Quicktime won't even play the movie, it gives "Error -2048: the file is not a movie file". I can't seem to even add the movie to itunes. Could somebody else see if their movie plays with a version of quicktime? I assume that it should...

It plays just fine in mplayer, and mplayer reports the correct codecs being used.

[pestilence4hr]

Ok, so even though quicktime won't play the file, and itunes won't do anything with it, transferring it over to the ipod using gtkpod worked perfectly. The video plays great on the ipod. Great howto!