Media Studio for iPod^® 3.5 - Manual

This software allows you to put movies, DVDs, Youtube content, downloaded and recorded TV on your iPod and iPhone in two simple steps. What you need is:

- PC with Windows XP. For DVD support you'll also need a built-in DVD-player.

- 4 Gigabyte of free space on a harddisk (for a 100 minute movie) to store a temporary file, if you would like to do DVD's.

- 5th generation iPod (video capable iPod), or 5.5G iPod (allows 640X480 video resolutions), or an iPhone

- iTunes 6.0 or higher to transfer files (iPod) or version 7.0 and higher (iPhone)

Before you start

- Make sure your system has a software DVD player (such as PowerDVD or WinDVD), if you want to convert DVD content.

- Make sure you have a harddisk with at least 4 Gigabyte of free space. By default the software will look for the C:\ drive as the temporary drive. You can change this in DVD Settings Menu \ Temp Drive.

Quick Guide

[1] Source Drive . Click the drive you want to open. This can be a hard disk, CD-Rom, DVD-R(w), DVD-Video, removable drive, flash drive or anything else. Press Open to start.

The content you picked will start playing in the Preview Window. You can right-click in the window for more preview options. Such as a fullscreen preview.

If the source drive is a DVD-Video or DVD-R(W), select it. DVD's can contain multiple titles, such as (home) movies, trailers, etc. By default, the software will pick the largest title. Usually this is the main movie.

[2] Action / Advanced You can start immediately by pressing the Action button. The file or dvd conversion will begin right away. If you need control over the picture quality, language settings etcetera, you click the Advanced button.

Click on Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles . Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes two steps. DVD's are now captured using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your processor, harddrive and DVD drive. If you have a brand new DVD disc, a relatively fast PC, diskdrive and DVD-rom, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. But if one of your components is slow, or your DVD disc is dirty or scratched, it will form the bottleneck and your speed may drop to 2 times realtime. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further to the final iPod movie file. This will take approximately 2 times realtime on a 2Ghz PC. So 45 minutes for a 90 minute movie. On average, you may expect to transfer a DVD to your iPod in less then an hour.

[3] Source Size You need to tell the software what size the source content is, so that it can calculate the optimal playback size on your iPod.

Most DVD's have a 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen) and most TV shows have a 4:3 dimension. For feature films shot in Academy Standard 16:9, the widescreen-setting is automatically chosen. In case your DVD was shot in Cinemascope , you need to pick the Cinemascope (2.35:1 aspect ratio) setting. This will correct the 'egghead' effect that you may see. When finished press Next.

[4] Zoom Level . Choose the zoom level. Then press Next.

If you prefer to see the whole movie in widescreen, choose 'Show All'. This will give you the whole picture, but it will show black bars on the iPod. The reason is that film sizes (so called aspect ratio's) and the size of your iPod screen are different. You will notice that the shots are missing abit from the left and right side. If you choose 'Zoom In', the software will chop the black bars off and blow-up the picture.

[5] Encoding Quality. Choose the encoding quality. Then press Next.

If you prefer a better video quality, choose 'Better Quality'. This will give improved video quality, but will consume more diskspace. This is recommended for most (home) movies. 'Save Diskspace' will result in more blockiness in the video. However, it wil result in smaller files.

[6] Episodes, Language and Subtitles

Next, you will see the episodes and language settings, the Episode , Audio Dub and Subtitle options appear.

A) Episode Menu. If your source material is a DVD, you have the option to select an alternative title from the disc. For example a 'behind the scenes'-documentary, or another episode from a DVD containing several tv-shows. The longest video on the disc will be shown by default, usually that's the main movie.

B) Audio Dub Menu. This allows you to set a foreign audiotrack. For example if you want to watch a movie in Spanish, you would pick that language and override the default English setting.

C) Subtitles Menu. If you choose subtitles, you will see a droplist of possible languages on the disc. By default the setting will be no subtitles. For example if you would need Danish subtitles, you would click 'yes'and then pick Danish from the droplist that appears.

[7] Action. You press Action and the PC will start converting. The preview video will stop playing to save processor cycles. Conversion takes one step with content coming from harddisk or CD. But coming from DVD, it takes two steps. DVD's are now captured using Cyberspeed technology. During Step1, the video and audio from the DVD will be saved to a temporary file, this may take between 10 minutes and 1 hour, depending on the speed of your PC and the speed of your DVD drive. If you have a relatively fast PC and DVD drive, you may see speeds of up to fifteen times realtime. In that case a 90 minute DVD will be captured in 6 minutes. After Step 1, Step 2 will start automatically. This step compresses the file further to the final iPod movie file. This will take approximately 2 times realtime on a 2Ghz PC. So 45 minutes for a 90 minute movie. On average, you may expect to transfer a DVD to your iPod in less then an hour.

[8] Transfer & Sync

When conversion is finished, your video will be on the desktop in a folder called My Movies. In it, there will be another folder with the same name as the DVD, if the source file was a DVD, and if it was from another source it will have the same name as the original file, but with a .mp4 extension. For example a file called 'home movie.mpg' will be called 'home movie.mp4'.

You need iTunes to transfer your video's to your iPod. You can't just drop it on the iPod disk icon from within Windows: it won't show on the iPod playlist then.

iTunes will automatically launch when file conversion is finished. You will be prompted to choose the File Menu in iTunes and then 'Add Folder to Library' (or the Control-O keyboard shortcut). After you've done that, choose 'Update iPod' from the same menu. The video file will be transferred to your iPod. You will find it in the playlist: Videos\Movies on your iPod.

Warning: if you delete the file from the desktop, after it has been transferred to the iPod, it will also be deleted from your iPod next time you connect the device to your PC. iTunes will always keep the content on your PC and iPod in sync, so it will no longer see the file and your PC and then remove it from your iPod also.

Menu Options

[1] Settings \Temp PC Drive You set the disk drive that you would like to store temporary files on. Choose the biggest available harddrive that you have. Temporary files may take up to 4 Gigabytes space that need to be stored on this drive.

[2] Settings \ iPod & iPhone Drive Leave this option ON by default. If you turn this OFF, your DVD conversions may take 5 times longer. Only if you experience problems opening or converting DVD's, you can try turning this option off.

[3] Settings \ iPod & iPhone Model

• In most cases, the default 5G model (black) will be the correct setting. Even if you're iPod has a white color.
• If you have a 5.5 generation model, which supports 640X480 video's, and you want to use it with TV-out, you may set it to the 5.5G model. The videos will then be encoded to 640X480 resolution, but you will only notice this when you connect the iPod to a TV or projector, because the iPod screen itself is still 320X240.
• If you have the new iPhone, you must select it here. It will encode videos in the native 480X320 resolution of the iPhone.

[4] Settings\iTunes Autostart This setting allows you to bypass iTunes launching everytime a video is finished converting.

[5] Download\Video This menu item allows you to download free video content from Youtube and Altavista.

If you encounter problems with the software, please consult the Tech Database: http://www.makayama.com/ipod350engfaq.html for common questions and solutions.

updated: 12-jan-2007