Ok, I thought I'd post about my experience with these two apps, which I finally got around to testing tonight. I'm just using a 17-second avi clip from my digital camcorder. It was shot in widescreen and the native resolution is 720x480.

Videora: Because I have a widescreen laptop, I can only do a one-button encode - the other button is not visible for me. But I think I'm doing the right thing by creating custom profiles and setting the one-time button to use a given profile. I tried the options listed here, plus the most basic default ones (for both h.264 and plain mpeg4). Some were visible in iTunes some weren't, but none of them would even transfer to the iPod. I eventually got fed up and decided to bite the bullet and shell out $30 for Quicktime Pro.

Quicktime Pro: I'm not terribly impressed with it, but at least it gives me workable video! Unfortunately it doesn't seem very configurable. It has an iPod preset (H.264), but won't let you tweak any of the settings within that preset. You can customize an mpeg4 setting to use H.264 and then make further customizations, but when I did this it wouldn't transfer to the iPod. I was able to make plain old mpeg4 files and customize stuff like bitrate and resolution, but no matter what I did, the video seemed to come out a lot worse than the H.264 preset. Specifically I was trying to change the resolution so that it would conform to the same aspect ration as the clip, but even when I did this, it still played it in a 4:3 box and it was all stretched/squashed - it doesn't put letterboxed bars on the top and bottom. Likewise on my widescreen TV (34") it did not fill the screen, but played in the same 4:3 box in the middle all stretched/squashed. The video had some terrible artifacting despite putting the bitrate up to 2Mbs and the key frame at every 12 frames.

I suppose I will have to look for other options. I know many here have had success with Videora, but if a big chunk of those trying it can't get it to work, this doesn't seem very reliable. Hopefully Videora will get things worked out in future version. Likewise for Quicktime, but somehow I think Videora will be faster to make changes...

While putting DVD's on the iPod is something I may do eventually, I think the best thing for me is to start slow with some home video, which is already broken down into short avi clips. If I can get that to display the way I would like on both the iPod and the TV, only then will it make sense to start playing with the much larger DVD files (and dealing with actually decrypting the DVD as well)...