iPod Need help manging media for appleTV AND IPOD touch in ITunes

[mcgowan7]

Hi All,

I'm not sure there is better answer out there for me, but here goes..

I just got an Ipod touch and want to load some videos on it.
I already have a large library of H264 encoded movies for Apple TV inside iTunes.
In order to get these onto the iPod Touch I have to re-encode them for the iPod touch format.
Also, I have to add the newly encoded movies into iTunes
I go into iTunes Get Info tab and I rename the movie to something like 'Batman_IPOD".
So now I have two copies of the movie in there Batman and Batman_IPOD.

Questions:
1) Is there a better optimized way or tackling this issue?

2) If not, there any way to separate the IPOD movies out into a different list, or a different tab so it looks neater and is more managable? Maybe like repurpose the TVS HOWS tab I can use for Ipod format movies or something? (tried that, but iTunes was too smart for that)

3) What is a good program to re-encode an appleTV H264 movie to Ipod Touch format? I can't use handbrake, because the movie is already in an h264 .mp4 format.
9I am currently using 'FREE video to iphone converter". It works ok, but curious if there is something better.

Thanks in advance,
-Mike

 

[mcgowan7]

Anyone help on this? Or am I stuck with two copies of the movie in itunes?

 

[davricho]

I think you can encode a version that will work on AppleTV etc and on ipod although this is a trade off as the quality won't be as good for viewing on a big tv etc. I have 2 copies in iTunes (one for AppleTV, one for iPhone) like you do and what I've done is just put a "z" in front of all the iPhone versions. What this does is then group them all together at the bottom of my list of movies.

 

[theLimit]

I encode my videos in HandBrake to work on AppleTV / iPhone / iPod / PS3 / Xbox360. I started with the iPod Hi-Res preset, changed Average Bitrate to 2500, audio to AAC+AC3, and video size to 640 wide anamorphic loose. File size is 2GB+ for most movies, but having one file in my iTunes that looks and sounds nearly as good as the AppleTV preset and also works on every device I have is worth it.

Edit: Sorry, didn't see that you can't use HB. Maybe you can try that for future rips. You can use Quicktime or iSquint / VisualHub to convert to various iPod formats. VisualHub can even create a single file that works on all devices, but it won't be nearly the same quality as re-ripping.