Getting Videos onto Your iPod/iPhone with WinFF

If you are like me, you like to take advantage of everything your devices can do.  I overclock my pc’s, my blenders, and like to watch movies on my iPod.  The wonderful features of these devices really are limited only to your skill set.  Finding the movies you want to watch on your next plane ride is easy, getting them on your iPod may not be.  That is where one simple free utility and iTunes comes into play.

There are many utilities out there that claim they can get movies or videos on your iPod for little or no cost at all.  Some of these are highly touted by a variety of sites but I find most of them to be adware, bloatware, or generally just not worth buying. My aim is not bashing software makers for what they do, but Videora comes highly touted by many sites and is obscenly cluttered with advertisements and thus my recommendation is to utililze another program!  This is where another free application, WinFF, comes into play.  Easily said, WinFF is the one of the best utilities I have found to date to get movies converted properly for your iPod.

This simple guide will be for the Touch; being that is the iPod I have!

Excerpt: WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions. WinFF is available in Brazillian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese Tradditional, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish. WinFF is open source and cross platform written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. WinFF is published under the GNU public license. WinFF is published without any warranty or suitability for any purpose

WinFF Download: http://winff.org/html/

Excerpt from Apples site: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats.

What does that mean for you? It isn’t as easy as you would hope trying to get videos onto your Touch, unless you use a utility like WinFF.  WinFF has the ability to convert many different video formats easily to a format that is compatible with your iPod Touch using some pre-configured presets.  You do have the ability to control with greater detail, but if I can get away with a simple preset, you bet your bottom dollar that I am going to take advantage of it.

The process is a simple one, only requiring a few clicks to accomplish:

• Open WinFF (DUH!)
• Click Add from top menu bar and browse to the video you would like to convert
• Change “Convert to” to “Ipod”
• Change “Device Preset” to “XviD for iPod xxx” xxx=aspect ratio of video
• Select your output folder
• Click Convert

The application will open a command prompt and show you the work in progress.  Unfortunately, there is no progress bar to show you how far along you are, but the command prompt will automatically close when finished (configurable).

When the application finishes the conversion, you can drag your new video to your iPod with iTunes (if you are managing your iPod intelligently and not relying on syncing). Next time around, we will convert a DVD to a video format that will work with your Touch.