The iPod video has been on the market for a while now, through several different incarnations and improvements over time. One of the most important tasks for this device is the conversion of video files from the usual formats to one that the iPod can understand and play.
The official solution is to use QuickTime 7 Pro, a commercial media editing and playback program created by Apple. QuickTime 7 Pro supports a wide variety of media file formats, and it can easily convert these formats to the proper iPod-supported format. QuickTime 7 Pro will make it an easy task to create audio podcasts as well as video podcasts, and in general can take care of most of your iPod media editing and conversion needs.
This software is not free, however. Upgrading to QuickTime 7 Pro will cost you $29.99, which is not a hefty price, coming in at just “8 cents a day for a year”, as the Apple webpage puts it. QuickTime 7 Pro is also available for almost all current operating systems from Apple’s own Mac OS X to the various versions of Windows.
There are other commercial programs and software available for the purpose of converting video to the iPod Video’s supported format. Looking at the capabilities of Quicktime 7 Pro though, it would seem that there would be no reason not to get the official media software from Apple, instead. These other commercial programs are priced at around the same range (thirty dollars) anyway, so why settle for third party programs when you can get the official program supported by the manufacturers?
One of the things missing from Quicktime 7 Pro is support for ASF and WMV, or Windows Media format videos. One of the third party competitors, Xilisoft, has come out with a program called the Xilisoft iPod Video Converter which supports conversion from almost all popular video formats such as AVI, MPEG, MOV, and (most importantly) ASF and WMV. So if you are looking to convert videos that are in ASF or WMV format, third party software may be the only solution, as QuickTime does not support these partly proprietary formats from Microsoft.
Yet another program that offers a solution is Videora iPod Converter. This program has the main advantage over the competition of being available free of charge. However, documentation for this program is scarce, although it purportedly supports the conversion of MPEG and AVI files. This program is actually meant more as a companion or extension of Videora, which is a program for intelligently downloading videos from the internet, rather than a standalone product.
A plethora of other programs would pop up on a search engine query, and in this and other similar cases, it would take a lot of testing to find the program best suited for your particular needs.
http://www.frozenipod.com/2007/ipod-video-converters/#more-35
