[warra]

i know of a few video converters but are there any that take away, or ignore copyright protection? don't get me wrong, i'm not looking to copy videos from other people. my questions comes from the size of the video file. typically a 45 minute show from iTunes is 500-600 MB. i know they all have the h.264 codec to contribute to the large size, but i want to convert them to a different format (mp4, perhaps) that will take up much less space on my iPod. Yea, i can have only the unwatched episode in my ipod, but its convenient to have them all. Any ideas or suggestions?

[TETENAL]

h.264 is mp4!

[warra]

no its m4v

[Art Vandelay]

Which is MPEG-4 Video. h.264 is aka MPEG-4 Part 10.

[TETENAL]

m4v is a just filename extension that Apple chose to denote movies that are intended to be playable on the iPod. That doesn't change the fact that h.264 is part of MPEG-4 (and can happily be used in an .mp4 file).

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You won't find a more efficient codec that plays on the iPod. Of course you can re-encode in half the frame size (since the iPod doesn't have a higher resolution anyway) and with a lower bitrate. I don't think the DRM of the iTunes movies has been hacked yet though, so you would have to film it with something like iShowU.