After a bit of experimentation, I’ve found some decent settings for converting video for my iPod. I typically convert with the intention of playing back on TV, so I ‘ve tried to find a nice balance between size and quality. I use Videora Converter on Windows and for Linux/*BSD, I use a small bash script I wrote (it just feeds filenames to FFMpeg):

#!/bin/bash

IN=${1}
OUT="${IN}.mp4"
LOG="${IN}.log"

ffmpeg -y -i ${IN} -r 29.97 -vcodec xvid -s 480x272 -b 900 \\
-bt 2 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128 -f mp4 ${OUT}

That’s a video bitrate of 900kbps, audio bitrate of 128kbps; framerate is forced to 29.97fps in order to eliminate A/V sync issues and the encapsulation is set to MP4. It’s not exactly broadcast quality, but it does the job. An episode of Lost, for example, comes in at around 300MB and is perfectly acceptable, quality wise, when output to my TV.

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