mrbelv
Level 1
(0 points)
Q: iPod videdo skips and hangs
For the past 2 years, I’ve been using my 30GB video iPod to run the audio and video portion of a live multimedia performance. It’s been working perfectly without issue, but all of a sudden, I’ve been having problems with the video playback.
The files are animations, created in Flash and exported to uncompressed AVI with the sound included. I then use AVS Video Converter to encode the individual AVIs to MP4. I encode the AVIs into one long MP4 files for two reasons.
One, I have noticed that occasionally, the iPod will crash between songs when playing audio. It’s rare, but I’ve never had it happen in the middle of playing an audio file. I could possibly have some bad audio files, but all of my files are either from the iTunes store, or have been legally ripped from a CD I own. I would hate for this to happen when calling up a video files during one of our performances.
Second, the iPod displays a “play” icon in the upper left-hand side of the screen when you output to video. This ruins the aesthetic of the performance when this displays every time a new file beings to play. It’s a shame Apple doesn’t give you an option to disable that.
The end MP4 doesn’t seem to be that large. It’s a roughly one hour video and the file size is 154MB. I would imagine that a feature film would be much larger than that.
The final MP4 runs perfectly in Quick Time Player from the PC. When I move the file to the iPod, I can play the MP4 from iTunes (from the iPod) on the PC and everything runs fine. When I play the file directly on the iPod, the file will pause in random places and sometimes the video will freeze and the audio track will continue to play.
The battery stopped holding a charge like it should, which from my understanding, is normal behavior for two-year-old iPod. I took it to the Apple store and got a replacement. After testing the files that were exhibiting the abnormal behavior on the new iPod, everything seems to be running fine. New files I create with the same method are running fine as well.
I don’t know why a dying battery would cause this, since I always run the presentations with the AC adapter plugged in. I’m wondering if the iPod updates I am periodically prompted to install would cause this. I also thought that perhaps the iPod’s drive was going bad either because of normal wear and tear or because the iPod has been dropped and in general jostled around so much. It would seem that this would cause errors in the playback of audio as well, which it didn’t seem to.
I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas as to why this might have happened so I can try to avaoid going through this again.
The files are animations, created in Flash and exported to uncompressed AVI with the sound included. I then use AVS Video Converter to encode the individual AVIs to MP4. I encode the AVIs into one long MP4 files for two reasons.
One, I have noticed that occasionally, the iPod will crash between songs when playing audio. It’s rare, but I’ve never had it happen in the middle of playing an audio file. I could possibly have some bad audio files, but all of my files are either from the iTunes store, or have been legally ripped from a CD I own. I would hate for this to happen when calling up a video files during one of our performances.
Second, the iPod displays a “play” icon in the upper left-hand side of the screen when you output to video. This ruins the aesthetic of the performance when this displays every time a new file beings to play. It’s a shame Apple doesn’t give you an option to disable that.
The end MP4 doesn’t seem to be that large. It’s a roughly one hour video and the file size is 154MB. I would imagine that a feature film would be much larger than that.
The final MP4 runs perfectly in Quick Time Player from the PC. When I move the file to the iPod, I can play the MP4 from iTunes (from the iPod) on the PC and everything runs fine. When I play the file directly on the iPod, the file will pause in random places and sometimes the video will freeze and the audio track will continue to play.
The battery stopped holding a charge like it should, which from my understanding, is normal behavior for two-year-old iPod. I took it to the Apple store and got a replacement. After testing the files that were exhibiting the abnormal behavior on the new iPod, everything seems to be running fine. New files I create with the same method are running fine as well.
I don’t know why a dying battery would cause this, since I always run the presentations with the AC adapter plugged in. I’m wondering if the iPod updates I am periodically prompted to install would cause this. I also thought that perhaps the iPod’s drive was going bad either because of normal wear and tear or because the iPod has been dropped and in general jostled around so much. It would seem that this would cause errors in the playback of audio as well, which it didn’t seem to.
I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas as to why this might have happened so I can try to avaoid going through this again.
PC, Windows XP Pro
Posted on Aug 18, 2008 10:07 PM