If you intend to use Podner to reformat your movie file so that it will work correctly on your iPod here's a little overview of what it means to encode a video.

Each movie on your Mac is a collection of pictures, known as frames, that are displayed while a soundtrack plays. Each frame takes up lots of hard drive space, and since most movies have 15, 24 or 30 frames per second, it can be rather inefficient to store them on your Mac. To save hard drive space, computers can compress these files by taking a series of movie frames and removing the parts that don't change from one frame to the next. Then these bits and pieces can be put back together at just the right moment to make it look like every frame is complete and you'll never know the difference. Let's say your movie has two seconds focused on a brick wall, and you shot the movie at 30 frames per second. Without video encoding, your movie would have 60 frames of very nearly the same image (allowing for a little wind vibration in your shot). If you could store that as two or three frames, you would save an enormous amount of hard drive space.

When you encode a video, you tell your Mac how to get the best picture quality and smallest file size in the shortest amount of time based on your particular needs. You make decisions about whether to reduce the frame rate to save space and time, make use of keyframes to prevent loss of detail, sacrifice or increase frame quality depending on the audience and whether the destination Mac can provide the horsepower to keep a constant frame rate, which bit depth to use, what sound quality you'd prefer and more. And even then, you would just barely be scratching the surface. Podner is the perfect tool to keep the most complicated decisions out of the picture. It's intelligent enough to reduce encoding into two choices: which encoder and what quality.

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