[k10k]

Evenin',

Any help with those questions would be great:

1) If I recharge my iPod to the wall... can I still play videos at the same time?
2) How much battery life does it really have? and what about after a few weeks ?
3) If I want to convert my DVD into an iPod legible format, how long should that take?
4) Does the TV output really suck?
5) When you follow all those apple tips to keep battery life good, does it really dramatically make battery life better?

Thanks

[jaydon34]

1. Yes you can recharge the device as well as play music and watch video. I do it everyday while at work.

2.Battery Life is great I think mines last 12+ hours when playing music.

3. This totatally depends on your computer. Im using an ibook to encode video and its quite slow. But I
convert then go to sleep.

4. Never used it for tv output but I think the ipod has the same resolution as a standard tv. So shows purchased from itunes will look good. (there encoding is probably better than average)

5. I would think so. I tend use mines till it shows the battery meter icon then I do a full recharge and just repeat this cycle. No problems here.

[golfer099]

1. Agree
2. My battery life has not been 14 hours (sas advertised) wiuth simple music playback - in fact its been about 7.
3. Did this on my mom's iMac G4 1GHz and it came out great.
4. Purchased shows from iTunes played via SVideo on my HDTV are reasonbablly good. Not perfect but decent. However, the DVD i encoded was on mpeg 4 and not using h.264 so that playback sucked on tv. you'll have to try out various encodings.
5. No comment - my battery dies quickly.

[memento]

I did a battery test with mine. Charged it. Started playing my music. Left it overnight. forgot I started the test. After 14 hours it was still playing.

Encoding time is dependent on SO many factors. For a given computer, H.264 2-pass will take the longest, but will look the best at a given bitrate. But the iPod can handle mpeg-4 with a much higher bitrate, which could encode faster but take up more space. Plus the results of each will be subjective to the person's tolerance for encoding artifacts.