Looking for MPEG-4 & AAC stream creator (ie iPod convert

[Bushido Philosopher]

All right, I am looking for a piece of software that can make MPEG-4 video and AAC audio streams in an MP4/M4V file container. (Specifically for Video iPod use.)

I have found some, but all of them produce a flawed output file (details below). So before you refer me to any, here are some that I have already looked into.

Videora iPod Converter
WinAVI
Cucusoft iPod Movie/Video Converter

... and of course, iTunes, but it only accepts Quicktime-related files as input.

The Videora converter seems to do the best job out of all of them in terms of what options are available and the final output file. But all of these programs output a flawed file. If you're creating something like an AMV (only a few minutes), it'll be fine, but anything feature length (more than an hour) or more, the audio will gradually get out of sync. So if you're watching something like the AMV Hell movie or any other given movie, it may be many tenths of a second off in the latter parts of the movie, which can be tremendously annoying. Cucusoft's program keeps everything in sync, but throughout the video, little pops and glitches can be seen and heard.

So if anyone has a solution to this and has a way that I can get my videos onto an iPod without a flawed file like above, then please respond.

Keep in mind, it doesn't have to be exclusively for an iPod. Anything that I can use to produce an MPEG-4 stream and AAC stream into an MP4 or M4V container will (hopefully) play on the iPod.

Thanks a lot guys. I hope there's something out there....

[Qyot27]

MeGUI can do it, and Sharktooth has made an encoding profile specifically for iPod. The only thing that it needs is an AviSynth script input for the video. I normally use Quicktime to encode AAC streams from Wave (which iTunes can do as well), although MeGUI can use FAAC or the Nero encoding dlls - if done this way, I'm pretty sure it comes out as one file and the next sentence is irrelevant. From there you can use YAMB to mux the video and audio streams together.

MeGUI can be found here: http://x264.nl/
It has an update feature, which I'm pretty sure includes auto-downloading of Sharktooth's profiles, if it doesn't already come with the profiles as part of the install.

Note: I don't own an iPod, and I never - to my knowledge - have created an MP4 file for my own personal use except as an intermediary step, and that never had audio in it. I use Matroska for my H.264/AVC encodes, although I use YAMB quite frequently for other tasks. This is just a suggestion, I don't know if it'll work, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't.