iPodifier FAQ

What is iPodifier?
Will iPodifier work on my Mac?
How much does iPodifier cost?
No, really, how much does it cost?
What DVR software does iPodifier work with?
Can I control which shows get loaded onto my iPod?
What control does iPodifier give the user over video transcoding parameters?
What types of video formats can be used with iPodifier?
How long does iPodifier take to transcode a video?

What is iPodifier?

iPodifier is an application that automates the process of getting video onto your iPod.  Although you can use iPodifier to simply transcode one or two videos that you have kicking around, it is primarily designed to work with a DVR application like SageTV, Windows Media Center Edition or TiVo.  Once setup, iPodifier will monitor your DVR application for new video and automatically transcode the video into a format compatible with the video iPod, add the new video to iTunes then sync your iPod.  In addition, iPodifier will organize video in your iPod into catagories (i.e. TV shows, Music videos, Movies et cetera) by creating video playlists.  Each TV show will have its own video playlist as well.  You can also select which TV shows get transfered to your iPod and how many of each show to transfer.  iPodifier will automagically make sure that the latest shows are always on your iPod for viewing.

Will iPodifier work on my Mac?

No.  iPodifier is currently written for the Windows platform only.

How much does iPodifier cost?

iPodifier is free.  I'd like to make some coin off this at some point, but I will try to do it by ads on the website or ads embedded in iPodifier.

No, really, how much does it cost?

Really, take it, use it, complain about features you'd like to see in it.

What DVR software does iPodifier work with?

iPodifier has been tested with SageTV and Windows Media Center Edition.  I expect it will work fine with BeyondTV, but I have had trouble getting that DVR application to work with my tuner cards, so I can't test it at this point.  Most DVR applications use hardware encoding TV tuner cards that store video in the MPEG2 format. 

I have used iPodifier with my series one TiVo as well.  I use TyStudio to automatically grab shows off my TiVo as they become available (I suspect there is similar software available for series 2 TiVo's).  Once a show is transferred from the TiVo to my PC, iPodifier takes over and transcodes the video and adds it to iTunes.

iPodifier does NOT currently work with Yahoo's new DVR application (formerly Meedio).  It stores videos in a dvr-ms format that I can not figure out.

There are a number of ways to automatically download TV shows via Bittorrent.  If you can setup your bittorrent app to save these downloaded videos to a directory, iPodifier will be able to monitor this directory and transcode and transfer these downloaded shows to your iPod as they appear.

iPodifier can be setup to accept video from multiple video sources.  To add a video source, just tell iPodifier where the DVR application stores its video content.  iPodifier will then keep an eye on this folder and transcode any new video that appears. 

Can I control which shows get loaded onto my iPod?

Yes.  The first thing iPodifier does is scan your DVR application's video directory and determine all the shows that are there.  By default, now shows will be transcoded and sent to your iPod.  Using the iPod Video Manager in iPodifier, you can setup quotas for each show.  For example, you can set it up so that all South Park episodes are automatically transcoded and sent to your iPod and that only the most recent five SpongeBob SquarePants are transcoded to your iPod.

What control does iPodifier give the user over video transcoding parameters?

For each video source that you add, you can specify the codec used (either mpeg4 or h264), video quality and video size that will be used to transcode the video for the iPod.  iPodifier uses FFMPEG to transcode video.  If you are familiar with FFMPEG, you can add additional transcoding parameters as well.

What types of video formats can be used with iPodifier?

iPodifier uses FFMPEG to transcode video files into a format suitable for the iPod.  It is rare that I come across a video format that FFMPEG cannot handle.  When you add a video source to iPodifier, you need to specify the file extension to look for (i.e. *.avi, or *.mpg).  iPodifier will automatically identify the codec of the video and adjust FFMPEG as required to properly transcode the video to an iPod compatible format.

How long does iPodifier take to transcode a video?

This can vary quite a bit based upon the video quality you select in iPodifer, the quality of the video from the video source and the CPU speed of your computer.  Typically, it takes ~15min to transcode a 30min show on my system (2Ghz Celeron), average video quality.