If everything were sold like iPods

We would be shopping like this

I'm a hero

Thing2 came out while I was working on one my PCs and said her iPod had froze. Did a hard reset and it's alive!

iPod's in the car

Since I got an iPod for Christmas I've been using it for most of my listening. Same with the wife. This was great at work or out walking. In the car - well that was a different story.

I started with a Kensington FM modulator from Amazon for the wife. Decent sound but there were too many stations around here so static and interference was a problem. I kept looking around and ended up at my old standby from a long time ago - Crutchfield. A few minutes there and I had a Harman Kardon Drive + Play on the way. I added the in-line modulator to maximize quality. After spending a Saturday afternoon putting it in her van she's a happy camper. Sound quality is pretty good with near zero interference. The wired remote makes it easy to select music.

For my car I did something a little different. Back at Crutchfield I found the USA SPEC iPod® Interface. Another afternoon spent hooking it up to the stereo (hidden in the trunk) and running a cable to the dash where the actual interface resides (behind the existing stereo control) my iPod is accessible as if it were the factory CD changer. Very nice.

Both products and Crutchfield are highly recommended.

24 on my iPod

I start with a mpeg file of 24. This is recorded with Beyond TV and a Hauppauge PVR 500 TV tuner and is about 2GB in size. I take the mpeg and drop it into Adobe Premiere Elements. After letting the file get indexed I add it to the time line and it looks something like this.



After spending a few minutes removing the commercials I have this. I've removed 20 - 22 minutes from the show.



Now comes a boring part. I have to export the file as a MPEG in 480x480 resolution. On my PC (Athlon 64 3000 o.c.'d about 25%) this takes about 45 minutes. At this point the file is about 850MB.

When that is done I let Videora convert the file into one compatible with the iPod. This kills another 30 minutes and takes the file down to ~260MB.



Once that is done I add the file to iTunes and sync to my iPod.



And play.



Minor note to self - If you have the Cygwin bash shell open Videora won't work. It sees the cygwin1.dll in memory and exits quietly. Turn on the debug option if this happens to you.