I took one of the Superman cartoons available from archive.org and tried various command line tools to make a version that would play on the iPod video. I seemed to have a bit of trouble getting ffmpeg to write a .mp4 file that Quicktime/iTunes liked, so eventually I used ffmpeg to write a raw .m4v video file, encoded the audio separately with faac, and then used mp4creator, part of the mpeg4ip tools to combine them, hint and optimize them. It seemed to work.
Here’s the tracks in the file…
[fishtank] % mp4info super.mp4 mp4info version 1.3 super.mp4: Track Type Info 1 video MPEG-4 Simple @ L1, 614.881 secs, 192 kbps, 320x240 @ 29.970027 fps 2 audio MPEG-4 AAC LC, 614.741 secs, 62 kbps, 48000 Hz 3 hint Payload MP4V-ES for track 1 4 hint Payload mpeg4-generic for track 2 Metadata Tool: mp4creator 1.3
I believe that these are the commands that I ran:
ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg -an -vcodec mpeg4 -b 192 -s 320×240 -pass 1 super.m4v
ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg -an -vcodec mpeg4 -b 192 -s 320×240 -pass 2 super.m4v
ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg -vn super.wav
faac –mpeg-vers 4 -b 64 -o super.aac super.wav
mp4creator -r 29.97 -c super.m4v super.mp4
mp4creator -r 29.97 -c super.aac super.mp4
mp4creator -hint=1 super.mp4
mp4creator -hint=2 super.mp4
mp4creator -optimize super.mp4
ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg -an -vcodec mpeg4 -b 192 -s 320×240 -pass 2 super.m4v
ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg -vn super.wav
faac –mpeg-vers 4 -b 64 -o super.aac super.wav
mp4creator -r 29.97 -c super.m4v super.mp4
mp4creator -r 29.97 -c super.aac super.mp4
mp4creator -hint=1 super.mp4
mp4creator -hint=2 super.mp4
mp4creator -optimize super.mp4
The net result: this video file. It’s a little blocky, but should play well on your video ipod. Let me know how it works out.