Every Flavour Beans

This post describes how to convert an AVI(DivX/XviD) compressed file to iPod compatible format. If the source video files are in DVD format, read this first. I will write about converting DVD format directly to the iPod format using a single application(eg: StaxRip) in future posts.

Converting AVI to iPod Format Using Videora iPod Converter

Download and Install Videora iPod Converter by googling for it.
Run the application from the Start menu. The main window looks like this.
Click the ‘Settings’ button(top menu) and select the preferred output format. After you are satisfied with the settings, click the ‘Save Settings’ button at the bottom. This step has to be done only one time. The settings can be further customised for each conversion job separately.

All the formats listed in the ‘Profile’ drop-down box are compatible with iPod player (and Sony PSP), so they affect only the output size and quality. A 2-pass encoding takes more time to get processed.

To change the paths where the output files should be stored, go to the ‘Devices’ tab in the Settings window.
Click the ‘Convert’ button in the menu to go to the file conversion window.

Then click the ‘Select File’ button(located at the bottom of the window) to select the file to be converted. After selecting the source file, wait for a while for the settings to be shown in the middle panel of the window.

Once the settings appear, change the ones you want to for this particular conversion job and then press the ‘Next’ button to go to the next step.
Optionally set a title for the job and finally click ‘Start Converting’ button to start the conversion process.

The progress of the conversion process will be shown in the displayed window.

The existing MP4 files that are not compatible with iPod player can also be converted using Videora iPod Converter. If you want subtitles to be hardcoded in the video file before you transfer it to iPod using iTunes, then read how to merge subtitles with AVI files and do the Videora conversion after doing the subtitle merging process.

All the above tasks can be accomplished using just a single application too(these applications might use multiple applications behind-the-scenes to get the job done), like StaxRip, Handbrake etc. But the advantage of the above procedure is that it allows the DVDs to be compressed and stored in AVI format as the primary goal and then to convert these AVIs to the specific format of whatever device(iPod, PSP, Zen Vision, N800 etc) the files need to be played on as per requirements.