General

This tutorial is based upon a Creative Vision:M, but I can't see why other brands of "poddy type devices" [including the IPod itself] would behave too much differently. Also I am only talking to rendering via the MicroSoft MovieMaker system, using wmv format, and it will be obvious from the content at this site why I am sticking to that format.

It is possible to play these movies on a TV, so that raises potential conflicts about the size of the rendered file, eg 400 kbps may provide great sound & vision on the IPod but to also get good resolution on TV you might be looking at a somewhat bigger file. And that file size may be beyond the capabilities of your device.

Personally I can't see any logic in using the device for TV viewing. If one is in a situation with a TV then surely one would also have access to a DVD player etc which would be far better suited to the task. The essence of the IPod is the portability, and still being able to do things "like at home", albeit on a small screen.

But I will allow you to make that decision and from my own experiments I think we can assume that what you would see on a TV will be of similar quality to what you will see here by double clicking to show the clips at full screen.

The Test

I captured some footage of the film The Magnificent Seven via the firewire copy through method, at 1,500 kbps standard profile in MM and edited a one minute sequence which contains all the "testers" [eg voice, music, action] in both sound & vision.

I then rendered it at several different settings, both MM standard and some custom profiles.

The first one is the MM profile "Pocket devices, full screen" and the second one is my "200 profile"

The 3rd one is "my 400" and the 4th one is "my 600"

The 5th one is "my 800" and the 6th one is the MM standard 1,500, the same setting I used to capture

For a music clip however, there is little action in the video [compared to a Western] but one may as well keep the audio to the same 128 kbps normally used in ripping CDs. So I made another profile of 400 total but with audio at 128, as seen on LHS below. Now the same clip when sent to UTube got squashed from the original 1,500 down to about 350 as a flash file, so very similar to my 400. It would appear that UTube "secret setting" is not up to the 128 on audio

Here is a zip file of these profiles "profiles"

Comments

I am personally going to use the 400/128 profile and most of my clips will be music videos. Each will be about 3 times the size of a normal song so that will not tend to fill up my space too quickly, allowing me to add music etc without the problem I had with my 5 gb Zen Micro of having to delete before I could add. If I watch on a TV it is ... [turns on TV], well just OK and not as good as full screen on PC, but I can't ever see myself using that option, and other problem is you can't put videos into playlists as such.

If you look at the specs on the first example above you will see that MS only give 20 kbps to audio out of the total 218. It does sound a bit raspy but is better than I expected.