iPod iSquint 1.5 is out!

[wizzerandchips]

just downloaded both vh and isquint,yried 3 dvds and niether will work, keeps coming uo with erros in the dvd. any ideas. have only downloaded the sample version before i buy, or not

 

[mkubal]

I put video on my iPod with the intention of playing it from my iPod on a TV. This really magnifies quality issues. I like the quality I get using Handbrake to rip straight to MPEG-4, 2-pass, 2200 kbps, native DVD resolution. I wonder if Chundles' method will give me comparable quality at lower file sizes.

To each his own I guess. I tend to watch movies using a DVD player and keep iPod movies as their own separate entities. I do rip some of my favorite movies (i.e. The Big Lebowski) at a high quality to be able to watch from my computer. Those I usually rip at 2500 kbps, 2-pass H.264. The resulting files are usually around 2 gigs, give or take a few hundred megs. The iPod video files I encode are 320Xwhatever @ 500kbps, single-pass, xvid, .mp4. It's a low-res file for a low-res screen. I realize I could do them at a higher resolution, but I'll never play them on anything larger than the iPod screen so there's no need really.

 

[MacinJosh]

Not sure what you're talking about, but I have encoded 640X480 and other widescreen formats in H.264 on both PPC and Intel machines using Handbrake for a while now. The program is a universal binary so if you find it to be slow on an Intel mac there's something wrong or you're emulating the PPC version for whatever reason.

I believe that the H.264 being discussed is a specific version of H.264 encoding used in the iPod, which last I was aware was not a capability of Handbrake. I'm sure it will be soon enough though.

Yes, I wasn't clear enough on what I was trying to say. I meant 640x480 H.264 for iPod. The version of Handbrake that I acquired has an option now for Baseline Low Complexity. It is not UB at the moment as there are quite a few problems with the UB compile.

Joshua.

 

[mkubal]

Yes, I wasn't clear enough on what I was trying to say. I meant 640x480 H.264 for iPod. The version of Handbrake that I acquired has an option now for Baseline Low Complexity. It is not UB at the moment as there are quite a few problems with the UB compile.

Joshua.

Ah, I see, I misunderstood. Very cool! Any idea on when they might get the UB version worked out? The current release seems solid as a UB. Are they adding more features than just the Basline LC? Seems like just adding a codec shouldn't be too difficult. Of course I'm not a programmer and don't know what I'm talking about.

 

[Chundles]

just downloaded both vh and isquint,yried 3 dvds and niether will work, keeps coming uo with erros in the dvd. any ideas. have only downloaded the sample version before i buy, or not

For the last time, iSquint does not rip DVDs. It re-encodes video files.

 

[mkrishnan]

For the last time, iSquint does not rip DVDs. It re-encodes video files.

Yes. Try Instant Handbrake for that.

 

[Chris Bangle]

isquints awesome.. so damn easy to use

 

[spicyapple]

Currently I use HB to do a 100% quality rip of a DVD to mp4 using MPEG-4 encoding.

How long does this take?

Have you tried MPEG Streamclip? You can load DVD .VOB files and then convert to MPEG with MP2 audio without re-compression. And it's fast (about 5-10 minutes) Then you take the .mpeg file and bring that into iSquint.

 

[Chundles]

How long does this take?

Have you tried MPEG Streamclip? You can load DVD .VOB files and then convert to MPEG with MP2 audio without re-compression. And it's fast (about 5-10 minutes) Then you take the .mpeg file and bring that into iSquint.

On my old G4 - everything takes a long time when it comes to video.

My 100% quality rip to mp4 results in a ~8.5mbps video with a huge file size but no loss in quality over the DVD. Export to iPod brings the file size down and the quality is still very good considering the end result is often a fifth of the size of the original mp4 file.

Takes a long time though.

 

[~Kat~]

Is this latest version any faster? It took forever with the last one and it crashed all time.

 

[madmaxmedia]

The iPod video files I encode are 320Xwhatever @ 500kbps, single-pass, xvid, .mp4. It's a low-res file for a low-res screen. I realize I could do them at a higher resolution, but I'll never play them on anything larger than the iPod screen so there's no need really.

I rip at lower size and bitrate for my iPod too. A lower bitrate file will conserve battery on your iPod, so if you're mainly just playing on your iPod anyways, you might as well do 320 x 240.

I don't know how much battery life is conserved, but I read this somewhere and it makes sense. At higher bitrates the iPod is basically continually reading off the HD. At lower bitrate the buffer should help a little. Although to be honest, I don't recall the iPod's buffer size, and whether it is actually large enough to be able to buffer video of even mid-quality (say 300 MB for a typical movie.)