Fifth-generation iPod (with video) Special Report: Extremely slow iPod-ready exporting from QuickTime

We continue coverage of extremely slow encoding times for the MPEG-4 and H.264 compression components in QuickTime Pro 7.0.3, in addition to an inability (in some cases) to play the resultant video files on fifth-generation iPods.

MacFixIt reader Steve writes:

"I have an older iBook 700 MHz, but I certainly did not expect it to take so long to convert a 60 sec .mov to MPEG-4. You may ask how long. After an hour, I feel asleep. The progress bar had barely was progressing very slowly when I decided to go to bed and leave computer on encoding.

Sebastian Meyer adds:

"I can attest that the export to iPod ready videos is ridiculously slow.

"For fun I decided to export the original 5GB iPod's presentation video. The video happens to be in 320 by 240 already, and I assume that the people who encoded it knew what they were doing. It did come from Apple itself, after all. But even with this video it took so long that I thought the export had crashed.

"This is definitely not something you could do on a whim just to drop an video on an iPod. It's more something to let churn away over night, even for this 7 min clip."

Index:

• Release notes
• Can no longer function as a bootable startup drive
• Cell phone interference
• Problems playing back home-encoded video; compatible formats; more
• Extremely slow iPod-ready exporting from QuickTime

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