As you read this, I’m currently taking a week off work to vacation with my family in beautiful Hawaii. “Is there a point to this gloating?” you might be asking yourself. Why yes… I mention it in the context of my iPod enjoyment.
There’s no reason to bring a computer with me for a week in paradise, but I never travel without an iPod and a cell phone. Thanks to Apple’s little invention, the iPhone, I’ve have everything I need in one device since the end of June. The only problem is, my 8GB iPhone is no match for my 60GB video iPod in terms of capacity, and I decided I would take only the iPhone.
Although I wasn’t planning to spend my days watching videos on my iPhone instead of watching the waves crash into the beach, the plane rides there and back would give me plenty of time to catch up on some unwatched TV show episodes and the like. So I decided to squeeze all I could into its relatively tiny 8GB.
I had plenty of songs, but video is what really eats up space—and what makes the time pass the quickest for me. So to make room, I started by removing videos of my nephew and my cat that I keep on my iPhone, then got rid of about 400 of the 700-plus photos I keep on there. That got me 400MB back. I then used Elgato Systems’ turbo.264 hardware encoder to shrink several video files I had down to iPhone resolution (480 pixels wide) while retaining high quality—in one example, shaving a 970MB file down to 533MB.
With my newfound free space and optimized video files, I then filled my iPhone to the brim with a bunch of TV shows and a few movies—perfect for my trip.