Make videos for iPods – the easy way

A new version of iSquint for Mac OS X is out! This is my favorite tools for quickly making MP4s for iPods and everything else that plays MP4s – “iSquint is an iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X. It’s many times faster than QuickTime Pro, works with almost all popular video formats, and it’s infinitely free-er. It’s also really easy. Just drag in your file, and click Start. You can also choose “TV” or “iPod” size, set your quality, or even go all-out by playing in the Advanced drawer. On a 1GHz G4, iSquint can convert most video files to iPod-screen-sized videos in realtime.” Thanks Jason! – Link.

Related:
Monday was the big “you can buy movies” press blast. Movielink and CinemaNow are both offering downloadable rental and “purchase” versions of movies the same day the DVDs come out. They’re more expensive than buying the DVD, only work on Windows, you can’t back them up and play them on your DVD player and depending on the licensor, you might get only 1, 2 or 3 computers that the movies can play back on… oh, it’s not so clear which mobile devices are supported (I’m going to dig around, the CinemaNow site has a link to portable players but it errors out and goes to the home page – I’m guessing it’s not the old Portable Media Centers and certainly not PSPs / iPod videos are supported).

Sooooo, if you’re going to buy a movie, the best way to keep the value of your movies still seems to be: buy the physical DVD, and use a tool like Handbrake lite (Mac) to make a MP4 version, and that will play on anything – just like when you buy a CD and make MP3s. If you have other suggestions, post them up in the comments. Pictured here, Logan’s run.