It took me a while to figure this one out, so I thought I’d share. Note, this is a Windows-only solution. I haven’t looked for converters for other OSes, but I know there are some nice ones out there:

I was looking for a way to take the divx videos in my collection and somehow treansfer them to my (shiny new) iPod video. You’d think it’d be an easy enough task, right? Well, I took a path that had many wrong turns and some ventures into bad places, but I finally came out okay. The main idea here was to take the video, convert it to a mp4 file that the iPod could play and retag it so that it shows up under the “TV Shows” list in the menu.

It’s not a one-click process, but it’s pretty close and it only involves two different pieces of software that are both free to use however:

• Videora iPod Converter – This handy little piece of software can take a divx file and push it back out to you as an mp4 with a ton of different encoding settings. The interface is nice and friendly, and there’s even a “One-click Transcode” button once you have your settings down. It supports various languages for the interface, and you can even set up your own profiles to tweak your video output settings even more. It’s freeware, but I’d definitely donate to the cause – it’s one of the simplest/easiest converters to use
• Win-AP – This handly piece of software does the magic of tagging the outputed mp4 file to work with the settings on the video iPod. Mainly what I was looking for (as I mentioned) was the ability to get my videos to show up under the “TV Shows” list on the iPod. Win-AP makes tagging the file simple, with fields for all sorts of information – Name, Artist, Album, Show, Episode Number, Season Number, etc. There’s no way to batch the tagging, but it’s still a handy little app.

It’s not too hard to figure out how it all works – once both are installed, you fire up Videora and point it at your divx video. After a while (depending on your system, maybe a long while), you’ll have a shiny new mp4 file sitting in your output directory. If you didn’t mind it not being tagged or anything, you could put that on your iPod right now. Me? I like to keep things organized, so I fire up Win-AP to get the tagging work done. It can create a backup file for the video it’s working with as well.

There’s tons of other ways to do this out there, but this was the first easy one I found…so enjoy!

Links:
Videora iPod Converter
Win-AP Show Tagger