free ipod video encoder

Having purchased an iPod Classic recently, I went in search of a free application to convert various videos to iPod format. I tried a few and found them lacking in one way or another: irritating, non-standard interfaces, buggy, crash prone and so on. But then I stumbled across WinFF and was pleasantly surprised!

WinFF free video encoding software

It’s a free, cross platform GUI for the command line ffmpeg video converter that comes with a host of preset ffmpeg encoding templates for everything from VideoCD to Flash Video and, most importantly for me, several iPod formats. You simply drop your source video files into the encoding job list window, select your output format, click Convert and wait for the files to be encoded.

The main drawback is that there is no graphical indication of encoding process, just the ffmpeg text output window which can be hard to follow. I also had to tweak the built in presets to take full advantage of my quad core processor, as the standard “use multi core” option provided by WinFF only starts two encoding threads, not the four that my CPU could utilise. But these are small niggles.

WinFF is an excellent utility and, even better, it’s totally free. If you’re in need of an iPod video converter WinFF should be top of your list.