Original IPod blew up due to faulty USB port. Got a replacement from ebay that had a faulty HDD....
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This story began as an investigation into why Cyberlink’s Media Espresso software produced video files of wildly varying quality and size depending on which GPU was used for the task. It then expanded into a comparison of several alternate solutions. Our goal was to find a program that would encode at a reasonably high quality level (~1GB per hour was the target) and require a minimal level of expertise from the user.
It’s been several years since Nvidia began pushing Badaboom and the idea of GPU-assisted transcoding, and given Intel’s major entry into the market last year, we expected to find a crop of mature, effective solutions. Cyberlink’s MediaEspresso and Arcsoft’s Media Converter aren’t new products; the latter is often recommended by Intel and Nvidia as a way to see the potential of Quick Sync/GPU transcoding. Users are posting more video of themselves on social networks and the camera quality of cell phones is a major buying point for a lot of people — so what software solutions work best?
The value proposition was obvious: if you could live without the 30GB or 60GB hard drive in an iPod Classic, you paid less than the $349 or $449 those models cost. Sure the screen was slightly smaller, so it wouldn't display photos quite as well.
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