A month or so ago, I was working on a Friday afternoon from home via iChat with the video producer from my work in California. We were trying to get the video podcast up for the weekend and he was having a hard time converting it to 320px by 240px for the ipod. We are currently only using Apple's Quicktime export to iPod but it kept coming up wrong. Time after time he would try it and it was coming out as 640px x 480px. We fought with it for a while trying different options but never did get it correct. Only was the pixel size twice as bit, but the file size was much bigger then we needed.

Finally, in desperation to get it done, I asked him export it from Final Cut Pro as a 320px by 240px Movie and then run it through Quicktime. That finally seemed to work and I didn't think about it again until this week. On Wednesday, I got an email from iTunes podcasting team. It was mainly recommednations for formatting video podcasts but what got my attention was the first item. Let me quote:

If you're encoding your video podcast at 320x240, please increase the resolution to either 640x480 or 640x360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don't look nearly as good on a widescreen TV. As always, make sure to test any encoding changes you make to ensure device compatibility. QuickTime 7.1's “Export to iPod” function will ensure that a video file is encoded at a width of 640 and is iPod-compatible.

So that was why they kept coming out wrong! Arg! And that was months before the Apple TV was even out. I will have to keep that in mind now as we continually are readdressing our video delivery to keep up. Now if only I could convince my management that I need an AppleTV for 'testing'...

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