PureMobile sent us in a 16GB iPod Touch for the purposes of this article. This is one of the few times an - essentially - mp3 player comes with a powerful operating system (other examples include the Linux-based Archos and Sandisk offers). Read on for more.
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Member since:2005-06-28
Just FYI, I am not a newbie in video technologies (you possibly missed my filmmaking/video blog).
The point is, it's not just the .avi container problem, but the fact that XViD is usually muxed with mp3, not AAC, which is another detail that needs to be taken care of, should Apple decide to support XViD. In reality it's a strategy/policy issue, not a technical one.
Member since:2005-10-01
The lack of avi support (namely divx and xvid)in the ipods has always been a turn off for me. I had this same issue when I bought my mac mini long time ago. Was expecting that I could just download divx and play my collection of avi file I've collected over the years only to find that quick time hates .avi so I used VLC.
I want to get an iPod touch for what amounts to a portable internet tablet, but hate the idea of having to transcode movies to play on it. So right now i'm up in the air about getting an iPod touch and having better internet or getting a archos 605 and having better media but worse internet.
Member since:2006-01-08
Member since:2007-12-10
Member since:
2005-07-06
Just FYI, XviD is MPEG-4. They're the same on-disk format.
The key is that none of Apple's products support MPEG-4 inside an AVI container file, which is how they are most often found; they only support it in MP4 and MOV container formats. However, there exist many tools to repackage an AVI file into an MP4 file without having to re-encode the video or audio. On *nix systems, ffmpeg and mencoder can both do it. It only takes seconds!