I’m approaching a week of ownership on the new iPod (with video) and there were a couple of issues raised by both me and others regarding it. First of all, the screen is not just good. It is nothing short of amazing – like they’ve taken one of the cinema displays and shrunk it down to iPod size. Videos are still a comfortable size for viewing and the only issue I have is that it’s not as readable as the monochrome screens when the backlight is off.

I’ve had no issues with scratching but I can see where it could become a problem mainly over the screen area. It’s not such a big deal when you only glance at the screen for information but when you’re using it to view media it becomes a whole different animal. I’m not totally concerned about the rest of the iPod scratching – if it does, it does, and it definitely will. I’ll just continue to use the kindly-included case for now.

This is a more isolated victory, but the new 60 Gb iPod will fit snugly in the dock of the 3G 15 Gb iPod. Therefore, taking into account different thicknesses for different drive sizes, you can kind of infer which models this will work with and which it won’t. I’m just happy that all my old stuff works with all my new stuff (except, of course, the remote – but I never used it anyway).

Finally, we get to the heart of the new iPod: the video. I have not yet been suckered into buying videos from the iTunes Music Store so I can’t give any information about how long they take to download. I have, however, been busy trying to make some of my current library play nice with iTunes. The easiest way is to use QuickTime Pro to export your video to the iPod format as noted here. This worked for about 90% of the videos I tried to do.

A couple successfully showed video but no sound. After some research, I found this page that states, in short:

If the format is “MPEG1 Muxed” or “MPEG2 Muxed,” the audio portion of the file may not be retained with QuickTime Pro or iMovie. You may want to consider using a third-party utility to convert the muxed file to a format that does allow you to edit or export (known as demuxing).

So there it is – files intended for conversion must be demuxed before they’re exported in QuickTime. The thread points to an app called MPEG Streamclip which basically takes a given video and exports it to a different type. From just playing with it it seems capable and it has alot of different options. I tested one of the files that originally didn’t work and was confirmed to have muxed audio. I exported it to a .mov format and now I’m waiting for QuickTime to do its thing. I have no reason to think it won’t work, but that brings me to my biggest issue with this newfound iPod capability: the waiting.

Expect to spend a lot of time multitasking if you’re planning on putting videos on your iPod. A music video on my machine (1.0 Ghz PPC G4 with 1.25 Gb RAM and 5400 RPM HD) took at least an hour if not more, and some 11-minute TV clips have taken at least 3-4 times that. You may have better luck than I have (and I’m itching to give it a go on Abe’s 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac) but chances are there’s still going to be a hefty delay. The points are: a) don’t expect to spontaneously throw any old video onto your iPod at a moment’s notice and b) make sure it’s really worth having that entire season of The Brak Show on your iPod where you’ll probably never watch it.

A final note: I noticed after this research that the videos that had audio issues were all in the MPEG format, whereas the trouble-free ones were AVIs.

UPDATE 1 : 10 November 2005

I just wanted to note that the MPEG Streamclip to QT Pro to iTunes to iPod method does indeed work for videos with muxed audio. As mentioned before, I exported to the Quicktime MOV format, and used Apple’s H.264 video codec and the AAC stereo audio encoding at a 320 x 240 resolution.

UPDATE 2 : 11 November 2005

I’ve been playing a little more, and if you have a music video on the iPod, it’s listed in your audio library as well as your video library, meaning the audio from the movie is included in the “shuffle songs” function. Nice if you only own the video for the song, since it’s doubly functional. It’s this bit of information that makes iTMS’ music video offerings worth $1.99. The only drawback is potentially burning it to an audio CD – I’m not sure whether that’s possible or not.