iPod 5.5 at Tplus 1 month and 4 months

(tags iPod, review, DVD, ripping, music, gripe, bug)

I was going to write something about living with my new iPod... but I didn't publish it until now. Heh the new iPod is a phone. Never going see it here in Japan.

iPod refresh at Tplus 1 month (originally created at 2006/10/23T12:46 Mon)

I've finished pretty much with Cubis 2 on iPod, after not having much success with the difficulty level after "rookie". I also bought that Majjong but it's just not as fun. There's a way to make things disappear that is both fun and sustainable, and Mahjong is not it. As far as my iPod gaming is concerned, it was just a flash in the pan and the majority of the experience is not going to be good.

I have, though, studied up on how to convert my DVDs to iPod readable format. The tale starts with searching the DVD mastering software section. I didn't know exactly what I needed to do to convert stuff, but I knew that the copy protection was a big obstacle. I first bought a guide "mook" (== magazine + book) which had pictures going through the whole process (starting with a picture of a hand placing the CD into the drive). It's one of those "even a monkey can do it" series (I swear that's part of the title), complete with advertisements for penis enlargement and phone sex services. One good thing about this mook is that it had a CD-ROM with all the necessary tools on it: DVD decrypter, DVD shrink, etc. None of the Internet sites I visited to study up showed me the ABCs like this book.

I first ripped some Aya Matsuura (松浦亜弥) music video, then the subtitled version (jp) of Singing In The Rain (雨に歌えば) that I got for 500 yen. Long ripping times. No one-touch or scriptable method.

After having some success with DVD decrypter and 3GRP converter at 320 by 240 (QVGA), I remembered that the iPod G5.5 supports 640 by 480 (VGA). I decided to standardize on this size, so I can watch on the PC and iPod without too much pain. Unfortunately the mook couldn't help me with this new stuff, but I gathered enough courage from the success to find iPodDrop. This program is little more than a shell for a properly compiled (eg. non-Cygwin) ffmpeg.exe for Windows, but it open-source so its promising. Here though I don't have much success with getting a quality picture. The backgrounds have blocky artifacts. I tried converting one of my favorite videos, Fortune by Nami Tamaki, but the red sails are just blocky. Also the video sizes are horrendous, 70MB for 3 minutes with MPEG4. Yeah I know that music videos have scene changes at 2 times a second but still... The QVGA sized videos I made before weigh in at under 10 MB for 3 minutes with H.264 encoding. Since both of these tools use ffmpeg, maybe it's just a matter of figuring out the right switches. Also the iTunes checks the file for the right encoding rates and sizes, so there's that mine field to figure out as well.

So now that I have another media reservoir to tap into, I've been digging through my DVDs. I figure short music videos will be good for right now. I have a (very scary) junk load of Hello! Project, Morning Musume, Aya Matsuura, Miki "Mikitty" Fujimoto (藤本美貴), and Koharu Kusumi (久住小春). I converted some of the palatable ones first. I also have some Shiina Ringo, Kiroro, Ulfuls, Anzen Chitai, Stray Cats, George Winston, etc etc that I should rip so that I can actually show people my iPod.

And when the music videos are done, maybe it's time to start ripping TV series (ER) and anime (Mushishi, Card Captor Sakura, Kaleido Star, Kamichu!, etc) that I just don't feel like watching right now. That would entail actually touching the DVDs which I don't feel like handling right now. I suppose this does not compute.

Let's go back and write down the annoyances about the iPod G3 and see if they are fixed now:

Annoyances	G3	G5.5
4KB notes limit.	yes	yes
Notes display rapidly disappears.	yes	yes
Whenever I plug in headphones, I hear a short burst of static.	yes	yes
When I select and play a song from a play list, sometimes it skips that song and goes to the next song.	yes	no (FIXED)
If I want a song to be counted as played, I have to manually fast forward to the end of the song. (This is iTunes/iPod spec?)	yes	yes
When I disconnect the iPod from the PC, it takes a long time (1-2 mins) for iPod to become responsive:	yes	yes
The backlight is always on when connected to the USB. (bug?)	no	yes (NEW)
The scroll wheel is too sensitive for setting ratings (stars).	yes	yes
The order for the Japanese artists names is unknown.	yes	yes
The order for the playlists with ASCII non-letters and Japanese, as well as static and smart playlists, is unknown.	yes	yes
The order for the playlists is not the same between the iTunes and the iPod.	yes	yes
When playing a song, I can't see the full album name or artist name because they don't scroll like title.	yes	yes
There's no easy way to return to the currently playing playlist (not song) after bumbling around with menus.	yes	yes
Folder Playlists don't transfer from iTunes to the iPod	yes	yes

And how about a round of new annoyances?

• Video has some wierd tags (episode id, episode num) that I haven't figured out yet for my particular use pattern of music videos.
• Video can be tagged with the regular audio tags but the iPod doesn't use them (well).
• Video in general cannot be rated (starred) from iPod.
• Can't search Japanese anything like for English/ASCII.
• Sometimes the iPod freezes on the start of video playback, and I have to reset the iPod. (This is rare though.)
• Can't use it with TrueCrypt.
• Still unable to backup save the criteria for all Smart Playlists, and the iTunes COM for Windows SDK (though updated to iTunes 7.0) still doesn't provide a programmatic interface to them.

If it sounds like I hate my iPod, its just because its already high level of quality causes me to expect a lot from it.

So much for my opinion at Tplus 1 month.

I'm still using it at 4 months, but I'm not ripping any DVDs. I am mainly just doing a lot of music, and I have already got a lot of music album cover pictures attached to my music files. With close to 50GB of music now, it's kinda hard to find songs I want to listen to. I've defined about a hundred playlists, so I can find the stuff I recently ripped within the last year, etc. I've even identified what songs I still haven't played.... 10GB of stuff, whoa. For example, I listened to can/goo's CD for the first time, even though I went to their concert more than two years ago. Sure I can find stuff like that while I'm using iTunes, but not while I'm on the iPod.

Stay tuned for something I figured out: Sort order of playlists.