TUAW Video Podcast: iPod Edition

So, I spent a good chunk of yesterday putting together our first video podcast for your viewing pleasure, and then a much larger chunk of time compressing and recompressing the video in an attempt to get it down to a tolerable size that would also play on any video-capable iPods out there. The subject matter of the video podcast is, of course, the new 5G iPod. To create the video podcast, I attached my iSight to a tripod, plugged it into my PowerBook and then launched QuickTime Pro and chose File—>New Movie Recording. Then I took the resulting video files and imported them into iMovie, did some basic editing, added a few titles, and then shot the whole thing out into the default h.264 iPod format defined by QuickTime. The result? A ten minute file that weighed in at 50MBs in size. Thus I began my compression quest.

I was chatting with Matt Croydon during all this and he pointed me to two useful links on compression: here and here. I managed to get one MP4 file down to 18MBs in size, but when I tried to load it to my iPod it didn't want to play nice (although it still plays fine in iTunes). I then referred back to this Apple document, paying close attention to all that information in small print at the bottom of the page. The result this time: a ten minute file that weighs in at 43MBs. Bah. The file should be embedded in our feed and show up in the iTMS sometime soon. In the meantime, here's a direct link to the file (right clickCTRL+click and save please). If you don't need iPod playability and just want to watch it on the web or in iTunes, here's a link to the smaller 18MB version.

If any of you happen to be compression gurus skilled in the dark art of codecs, please share your arcane wisdom with us in the comments.

Update: After some more investigation it doesn't look like the widescreen off mode actually crops (or at least it doesn't just crop) as the video appears a bit thinner and squished when that mode is employed on a widescreen file.