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Suzie Goldie asked:


It is quite easy to maximize the battery life of your Movie iPod. If you follow the following two tips, they will help you gain more power to watch your favorite movies or listen to your favorite music on your video ipod. When you try them, you’ll see how easy it is to achieve longer ipod battery life. This is useful because it is a an inconvenience to start an ipod movie download and then discover during the process that the ipod battery power is low, forcing an interruption with your download sometimes more than half way through.

First Tip: This tip allows you to gain over 3 hours of movie playback on your 30GB Movie iPod

According to the user’s manual, one full charge of the 30GB movie/video iPod will give you two hours of video playback. Nonetheless, if you compress your movies for iPod during playback and you do not mind giving up a little bit on image size, you would gain almost 3 hours of straight movie/video play. On the 60GB model, you will gain an extra 40 minutes.

Without question, movies with smaller picture sizes, lower bitrates and frame rates, will play longer on one charge than a larger movie file with higher settings. Using MPEG-4 compression, two hours of a full-screen movie, scaled down to only 192 x 144 and at 15 frames per second will play for three hours. Using 15 frames per second instead of 30 and a smaller scale boosts the video playback time considerably.

When using a higher scale, again with MPEG-4 compression, you will get less movie playback time. At what time you use the scale the same size as the movie iPod’s screen, 320 x 240 at 29.97 frames per second and the average bitrate set to 1000Kbps, your movie will play for about two hours before your battery goes out. Run a test for yourself using both settings and see which one you prefer. In any case, if extending your battery life for more movie playback time is your primary goal, definitely use the smaller scale and lower frames per second speed.

Second Tip: Disregard your fast forward button

Regarding saving the movie ipod battery power, the disadvantages of using fast forward button on your iPod far out weighs the advantages. If you desire to have the maximum amount to your battery power to watch your movies or listen to your music, keep your finger off the fast forward button! Remember that the life of your battery is ruled by the requests made on your video iPod’s mechanical hard drive, how many times it has to rewind and read data. This is true especially when you shuffle through your library.

The truth remains that there is very little reason to shuffle through your movie library, because the movie iPod winds through the hard drive at regular intervals, loading your next songs into its solid-state memory. What happens at the times that you shuffle or fast forward is that you actually empty the memory

Emptying your movie ipod library causes your hard drive to work harder. It must now rewind again to read ahead a bunch more movies and/or music. It is a waste of energy, which creates unnecessary wear and tear on your movie iPod. Keeping your play lists short is the easy workaround to avoid the fast-forward button temptation. Take the time to edit your play lists you do not want to have to delete them from the files.

Lastly, you should follow the manuals instructions carefully. The manual likely has maintenance tips that will help you get the most out of your ipod. You can also find helpful information that will guide you through the process of saving your memory and battery while using your iPod.