News

LoadPod Adds Movie Loading Service for Video iPods

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 3:40 PM - by Staff

LoadPod on Wednesday announced that it can now load DVD movies, in addition to music libraries, on its customers' video-enabled iPods. Available in eight U.S. cities, LoadPod's service picks up a customer's iPod and media collection and returns it within a few days.

The company encodes movies at the iPod's 320 x 240 display resolution and says that each one takes up less than 1GB of storage, on average. As with a DVD player and a TV, the films fill up the iPod's display if they're non-widescreen or appear with black bars across the top and bottom if they're letterboxed.

LoadPod only handles the movie itself. Trailers, subtitles, commentary and bonus features are not included. The company will only load full-length feature movies from store-bought DVDs; it doesn't handle TV series, live concerts or other content.

Pricing for the new service is US$34.95 per DVD for 5 to 10 DVDs, $31.95 per DVD for 11 to 20 DVDs and $27.95 per DVD for 21 to 40 DVDs. Movies longer than three hours are subject to a $10 surcharge per hour.

LoadPod's service is available in New York City, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. Even if they live in one of those cities, customers should check the company's Web site to make sure they live in an area code where the movie service is offered.

5 comments from the community.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Dec 28, 2005 4:48 pm

This may be a stupid question but isn't this a violation of the DMCA?

Also, what is with those prices? $35 per DVD? That's insane.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Dec 28, 2005 6:36 pm

Quote
Guest wrote:
Also, what is with those prices? $35 per DVD? That's insane.

That is a lot of money! Even on the fastest Quad G5 a feature length film would still take about 8 hours to encode so I can see why they are charging alot.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 444 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Dec 29, 2005 8:53 am

Quote
Guest wrote:
Quote
Guest wrote:
Also, what is with those prices? $35 per DVD? That's insane.

That is a lot of money! Even on the fastest Quad G5 a feature length film would still take about 8 hours to encode so I can see why they are charging alot.

It would only take a fraction of that time, actually. On my Mac mini (which is pulling about 1/8th the processing power of a Quad G5, at best), I can encode a DVD into full-resolution MPEG4 video in about 2~3 hours. Granted, H.264 (which I assume they are using) takes about 4~5 times as long. But even then, that's not so bad for such a slow system. Plus, I'm encoding at high res. iPod videos are only 320x240, which would take much less time to encode. All things considered, a Quad G5 could probably convert a full-length movie to an iPod-friendly format in well under an hour.

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Bigfat said:

member since 22 Jun 2004 with 36 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Dec 29, 2005 11:04 am

Wow, granted it's not mac software, you can purchase a one click convert piece of software called PQDVD to iPod for around $40, or use a series of freeware to rip and convert. Just today I got Batman:Begins to 650MBs in about 45 minutes in MPEG4. Quality is great too.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Dec 29, 2005 2:59 pm

It would only take a fraction of that time, actually. On my Mac mini (which is pulling about 1/8th the processing power of a Quad G5, at best), I can encode a DVD into full-resolution MPEG4 video in about 2~3 hours. Granted, H.264 (which I assume they are using) takes about 4~5 times as long. But even then, that's not so bad for such a slow system. Plus, I'm encoding at high res. iPod videos are only 320x240, which would take much less time to encode. All things considered, a Quad G5 could probably convert a full-length movie to an iPod-friendly format in well under an hour.[/quote]

The best peice of software I have seen for doing this is HandBrake which is free. Most of the benchmarks I have seen will only utilize about 175% of 400% CPU usage while ripping and encoding. The bottle neck is File/Optical IO rather then CPU cycles. I would be suprised to see a full length movie encoded in less then 5-6 hours with a Quad G. Especially if you use two pass encoding, which you would want so that you don't have digital squares during motion.

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