Quality Video Content for iPods

After a while of playing around with my iPod 5th Gen, here’s a tip for getting true video quality content for the iPod.

The first conclusion I came is that there’s no high-quality video content for the iPod out there, none, zero, nada. People have the perception that 256kbps is enough quality for video settings and that 128kbps is crisp enough for audio settings.

Right now, the internet is bloated with poorly formatted videos, often badly synchronized with the poorly compressed audio that accompanies it.

I’m not sure if the video capabilities of the iPod were meant to play crappy videos that look just scantily acceptable in the 2’’ screen of the device, yet awfully pixelated and blurry on a common 21’’ TV set. We know for sure that the H.264 format can deliver neat output in a reasonable filesize, but people seem to give importance only to the latter.

Every song you buy in iTMS is capped at 128kbps, that’s 40% of the original audio quality. I haven’t checked the videos, but my guess is that at least their audio is also capped at 128kbps and video must be 256kbps at 26fps or so…

So where’s the tip?

The tip is basically this: buy DVDs, CDs of your favorite stuff, compress it at decent resolutions (the TV output of the iPod is not capped at 320×200), and then move it to your iPod, share with friends and/or do whatever else you want with it.

Make sure your audio settings are higher than 160kbps for audio, and 512kbps for video. Anything below that mark is just a waste of bytes, bits, beats, frames and pixels.

But then, even if you buy DVDs or CDs, you must deal with DRMs and other kinds of limitations to extract the content of the thing you just bought; or what’s worst, labels releasing loud/clipping music straight from the box.

So in the end, there’s no tip, just total damnation for the music and videos of the world…

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