Home Movies on your iPod
by Gary Woods

As you may have heard the 5th generation of Apple's iPod can show movies on its very bright and clear screen. So how can you get your own Home Movies playing on your adorable little iPod?

If you've saved your Home Movies in QuickTime format version 7.03 of QuickTime Pro which sells for $30 has a Movie To iPod (320X240) export option. The exceptions for QuickTime Pro are MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files because of the way they mix audio and video into a single track. Also such Apple products as iMovie and Final Cut Pro offer great export options.

The only downside of preparing your Home Movies to be displayed on you iPod is you'd better set aside a substantial amount of computing time to get the task accomplished. Apple's H.264 encoding creates wonderful looking files, but it can take four or five times longer than real time to encode the data.

Another option is to use a single pass H.264 encoding process via QuickTime Pro's MPEG-4 export command. To do this click on the Options button, choose MP4 as the file format and H.264 as the video format. The image size defaults to 320X240 pixels, but if you have wide-screen content, you may want to do a little recalculating to view everything. Lastly, click on the Video Options button and make sure to enable the Baseline Profile. The next thing you know, you'll be checking out your movies and cruising to your tunes.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910