just got myself an ipod touch & i've noticed something that sucks. the options for video playback files kind of sucks. is there a video conversion program out there that i can turn my WMV's & MPG's into mov's or some other format able to be played on the ipods?

What a coincidence.
just got an ipod classic for my birthday a few hours ago. Ran into the same problem - when you convert video in iTunes it does video only and looses the audio. (it's not smart enough to deal with muxing)

I already have Ulead Video Studio 10, and that has an option to convert video to and ipod format (MP4) so I used that. If you already have video editing software, give that a shot first.

Didn't say what platform your on, but from the Mac side - Toast or Popcorn. From the same company - Popcorn is cheaper and made to do this, Toast does more DVD/Disk burning, but can do what Popcorn does. If you want to spend a little more money and speed the process up, get Elgato's Turbo.264, it comes with a h.264 coprocessor that offloads the conversion into h.264, and cuts down the time required to do the conversion. Miglia makes one too, and for the same price. The Turbo.264 is nicely integrated with Elgato's EyeTV, so it will convert recorded TV directly into h.264 for the ipod from that program, or it has it's own standalone application to do for other videos. None of these will do an encrypted DVD, but convert anything else.

Don't know about the PC world but would guess the same sort of stuff exists there too.

i would be on a PC. I'm not really in the market to look for something that's gona cost a butt load of cash. it'd be nice to have but not a need. i'm currently on a PC and windows media player can convert it to AVI but its huge. a 9 meg file turned into a 750 meg file. quite amazing really lol. i don't even know if it can handle AVI's anyway

Happy B-Day '05 X, i coincidentally bought myself the i pod for my b day on Monday =)

Well, a little searching found a Windows version of the turbo.264 hardware. It's call ADS InstantVideo To-Go. Prices seem to run from $60-$70. Have no idea how good the product is, since I don't do WIndows.

I've used my version to copy HDTV shows I've recorded and edited the commercials out of to watch them on my iPod when I have nothing else to do. and to convert some old videos and home movies to the iPod. For me the coprocessor make a significant improvement in conversion times, and I've got 2.33ghz Macbook Pro. I haven't measured it, but it seems to cut conversion time in half, and also frees up the CPU in the computer to do other things while it's running, without impacting the conversion process.

The iPod only plays h264 and mp4 video files.

There've gotta be some free utils out there to convert other vid formats to m4p.

I just googled "convert video to ipod format" and came up with something called "Videora".
Don't know if it's any good.
Might be worth while to check the ilounge.com forums - I'm guessing they've got a whole bunch of recommendations.
(I stopped looking when I found the software I already had for video editing did a good job with it.

As RReuscher said, conversion takes a while as it is CPU intensive. I think a 22 minute Futurara episode took about 30 minutes to render in Ulead - but I wasn't timing it (Athlon FX51 CPU with 2 gig RAM).
If you end up getting heavily into video on the ipod, you'll definately wanna check out that .264 hardware he mentions.

Xilisoft

Will convert just about anything into just about anything. For all of $35.

A bunch of free ones here:

Linky - Converting Video for iPod - Mac & Window

hey guys, thanks a fricken bunch. those were exactly what i was looking for. mucho kudos & if you guys are ever in the DC area leme know & i'll buy you some beers