Good-to-Go Video, Part 1

About a month ago a friend and I were talking about the whole personal media player thing. He liked the idea of watching video on an iPod or PSP, and in all innocence asked me a killer question:

"So how would I get last week's Smallville on an iPod?"

Good question. I don't worry about those things because I've already got an assortment of video capture devices and conversion software. But how would someone like him -- no technophobe, but no fan of overly expensive or complicated solutions -- get video from any source and get it onto either of these popular portable gadgets? I decided to see what was out there.

One option for those that want to grab content from a video source and don't have a capture card is Neuros's MPEG-4 Recorder 2, which I mentioned in January. Slightly bigger (but lighter) than a PDA, you plug the MPEG-4 Recorder 2 between your video source and your TV, and pop a Memory Stick Pro Duo or Compact Flash card into one of the front slots. Once you turn it on (everything is done through a credit card-size remote) you can navigate the fairly intuitive interface on your TV screen to record, play back and manage video and audio.

Video can be captured at VGA (640x480), QVGA (320x200) or WQVGA (368x240) at a variety of quality settings. You can also set recording timers as you would on a VCR. Getting video onto the PSP or iPod isn't quite as painless as recording, though; video files have to be moved to the correct folder on the Memory Stick Duo for the PSP to recognize them, and files destined for the iPod have to be copied from the memory card to iTunes and then synchronized.

Capture quality was pretty good. I got a fair amount of detail from Kakurenbo, a moody anime horror film, and a high-contrast, fast-moving short also played back without visible artifacts. Bonus feature: playing the video back directly from the MPEG-4 Recorder 2 at full VGA, the image was good enough on my TV that I could see using the recorder as a sort of mini-VCR. Pretty cool for such a small gadget.