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Optimising Your Video Ipod Battery
Apple’s advertisement rates the 30 GB iPod as capable of two hours’ worth of video playback on one full charge. However, media savvy people have found out that they can play videos on their 30 GB iPod for nearly three hours straight after a full charge! How do they do it? The basic answer is: COMPRESS! If you’re willing to make a couple of compromises with the way your videos play on your iPod, then compressing files is the way to go. Do that and we can guarantee you that you'll get an additional 25 minutes extra from your 30 GB iPod’s battery life (more so if you have the 60 GB model). Of course, it's a trade-off - the smaller videos, with smaller picture size, and lower bitrates and framerates, will play longer on one charge than a video that tops out of the highest settings available, but you do inevitably lose something in video quality. The difference in demands on the battery though can be immense. Let’s take a two-hour full-screen video file as an example. Compress it using the MPEG-4 format and scale it down to only 192 x 144 and 15 frames per second. Then, play it on your video iPod. Don’t be surprised if the video plays on your iPod for three hours and four minutes straight! It’s amazing what compressing files can do to your iPod experience. It’s certainly the number-one recommended way of getting the most out of your iPod. Beyond this various minor battery-saving ideas have been suggested. Some have suggested that pressing the fast-forward button will shorten the battery's life, and this must have some truth to it. Your battery’s life is largely dependent upon how often the iPod’s mechanical hard drive has to spin-up and read data. This does not only apply to videos of course. It is especially relevant to music – especially when you’re 'SHUFFLING'. What normally happens when you play music or video on your iPod is that it spins the hard drive at a regular pace and at regular intervals loads up the next few songs into its memory. If you fast-forward through the songs or videos, you’re emptying the memory of your iPod. As a result, the hard drive has to keep loading up again in order to keep reading ahead. Certainly this will help to drain precious battery life. If you want to avoid this problem, try making some Smart Playlists so you can avoid the artists or albums that you constantly find yourself fast forwarding through. One related issue here that comes to mind is how to optimize your iPod battery so that you can watch a long video in several sessions and know where you left off, and so avoid all the fast-forwarding to find your place. As outlined above, skimming through video scenes causes the hard drive to spin-up at each stopping point so that each time you search ahead, you’ve just blow a few minutes of precious battery life. How can you solve this? Simple! Before you exit a long movie midway, press the center button on your iPod and note the time in the clip so you can return to it later! Videos that are optimized for iPod playback should play for nearly three hours straight. If you really want to squeeze out an extra 20-30 minutes of video playback, you’ll have to scale down your video and compress it to the point where you WILL notice a difference. Compression can cause the file to lose some of its properties, resulting in a small amount of blurring or strange contrast levels in the picture. It's a trade off. If you're not willing to degrade your picture quality, you don't have to, but just make sure you're never too far from a power outlet! This is just an intro click here for the complete ipod article
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