You may not know but for your information, your iPod MP3 player can support two video formats for iPod video downloads, MPEG-4 video and H.264 video. Since these two formats are compatible with your iPod, people often ask a common question. Which of the two should they use then? In terms of picture quality and space usage, H.264 iPod video downloads is apparently the winner over MPEG-4 video. But it does not mean that MPEG-4 is inferior or no good in these two aspects. What this indicates is basically, you can download and save more music videos and videos onto your iPod in H.264 format than MPEG-4.

Yet there are some who also disagree that H.264 is better in picture quality. Experts can even tell you that encoding at higher video settings would produce videos of equal quality be it H.264 or MPEG-4 video format.

Since this is the case, it is very likely that everyone would go for H.264 video format for their iPod video downloads. But one thing that users realize is that the encoding of video using H.264 video format is extremely slow. The wait can be so painful that people simply give up halfway and switch to iPod video downloads in MPEG-4 format. It is really your choice on which format to use for your iPod video downloads when weighing the factors such as time needed, quality, disk space usage and whether you have the patience to wait.

Other than the video formats for iPod video downloads, we have to also check if the video files we are downloading from online sources are in MPEG, AVI, or other formats. Most of the time, online music stores would provide video downloads in these versions so as to be compatible with other MP3 players. In such instances, you would need to convert the video files before your iPod can actually interpret the data. If you are tight in your budget, try using a free video convertor called Videora iPod Converter.