Difficulty transferring video to new iPod Classic

[Jeff Simpson]

On Wed, Jan 2, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Henry <henry.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all -
>
> I'm having some difficulties with my new iPod classic 160Gb and Amarok
> 1.4.8. I'm running Fedora 8, and have upgraded to the bleeding edge packages
> for amarok and libgpod as below. I'm running into problems copying video.
> Every time I add an m4v to the transfer queue, Amarok tells me that "one or
> more media files are already on the device" and no transfer takes place.
> Syncing music works fine.
>
> [root at oscar henry]# yum list installed amarok gtkpod libgpod
>  Installed Packages
>  amarok.i386                              1.4.8-1.fc8            installed
>  gtkpod.i386                              0.99.12-1.fc8          installed
>  libgpod.i386                             0.6.0-3.fc8            installed
>
> I can use GTKPod to transfer video successfully, but doing so causes GTKPod
> to trash the Artwork directory on the iPod, complaining that the directory
> is "too large to be used as a buffer file" and caps every file at 256Mb,
> necessitating a rather tedious re-sync of Artwork from Amarok (which doesn't
> detect that the art is broken until the directory is forcefully deleted).
>
> It would also be good to do all the management in one application, which is
> why I'd like to find an Amarok-based solution. Any ideas?

Yes. It's likely that I know exactly what problem you are having. I
ran into the same thing when I tried to sync movies that didn't have
proper mp4 tagging. If two movies have the same tag (or same
lack-of-tags, as in my case), they are considered the same file to the
iPod, and won't sync. The solution is to re-tag the file. You can do
this from within Amarok, but it can be very slow to write the tags.
I've found success with mp4tags and AtomicParsley, both of them are
able to write the tags.

Note: I'm not sure if that will still work with the Matroska (m4v)
containers, but I know it works with the mp4 containers.

> Oh, and while I'm here, how do I arrange for podcasts to be automatically
> copied to the iPod? I can get them as far as automatically added to the
> transfer queue, but I'd really like to leave my iPod synced overnight and
> pick it up the next morning with all my podcasts updated.

No clue on this one, sorry!

 - Jeff