New iPod. That's right!

I got the 60 Gb, Black Version... here it is:

The picture that it's showing is of a friend of mine: Cristina Bringas (I've written about her before).

Here's the back panel:

The thing that bought me into it (which I'm very embarrased of not knowing about, being a Mac fan and all) was that it plays video. I've downloaded two videos from the Apple Music Store before I bought it (that I couldn't find anywhere): Banquet from Bloc Party and They from Jem. Both of them played beautifully in the new iPod; a problem arose when I tried to import some other videos that I've downloaded from other sources. I've converted the AVI ones to MPG so that I could import them into iTunes and then do the "Convert selection for iPod" (which took almost half an hour for one video to go through the whole process; and I have almost fifty videos that I want to upload to my iPod, you do the math). Most of the initial MPG videos (with which I was testing, including the ex-AVI and the ones that were originally MPG) didn't have sound but did play in iTunes as well as in the iPod.

After digging in the Internet for an answer, this is what I found: Multiplexed MPEG-1 is bad, and MPEG Streamclip is good. Apparently, a Multiplexed MPEG-1 movie stores it's sound information in such a way that when it's being converted into another type of movie (MOV, AVI, MP4, etc.), the file doesn't bring it's sound with it to it's new type. So, a "demultiplexing" or demux is needed before the conversion, and this is where MPEG Streamclip comes in. Besides converting between a wide variety of types of movies, it also demuxes in the process if needed.

Very nice app, by the way. Just drag n' drop the movie into the square, choose "Export to MPEG-4" in the File menu, a window will pop up, press the "iPod" button in the top right corner which will put in all the necessary options to make an iPod friendly movie, press the "Make MP4" button, write a location and name for the new movie and you're done. This new movie will be ready to be imported into iTunes and will play in the iPod as is (no "Convert selection for iPod" in iTunes needed). Another great thing about this is that it only takes around 15 to 20 minutes for the process of converting a movie to complete; so it doesn't only solves my problem, it also cuts my waiting time in almost half. Oh, and did I mention it's freeware? Yeah, Squared 5 rocks!