Periodically, my ability to write to my iPod would lock up, and everything would seize. dmesg gave me this:
[4512253.553000] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
[4512253.553000] fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
[4512253.553000] File system has been set read-only
which I assume means that the stock filesystem preinstalled on my iPod is somehow gorked. A quick mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2 cost me all my preferences and forced me to resynchronize, but the error message has gone away and hasn’t comeback. Be really careful where you point that thing, because if you’re not, and point it at the wrong partition, your ipod will probably need to go into the shop.
I’ve changed the my conversion script a little, because once I actually got my videos onto the ‘pod to watch them, they’d hang up periodically – the sound would drop out, or they’d just freeze and bail back to the menu, or whatever. Some small tweaks to the encoding options, but early indications are that those problems are bagged. Also one totally brain-off thing that’s fixed that I hope you don’t notice.
Other than that, once you can goad gtkpod into acting right (the new version does, indeed, sync video, but if your system is anything like mine you’ll need to do a “ln -s /usr/local/lib/libgpod.so.0 /usr/lib/libgpod.so.0” after installing everything from source. Not for any really great reason, but because that seems to make it work. After that, things seem to go swimmingly. So now I get to have conversations where I say that I successfully put video on my video iPod, and people look at me like I must be functionally retarded if I thought that was hard.
Aside from that last bit, I’m going to call that a win.
UPDATE: Nope, still choppy video. Wierd, it’s different things for different files. My copy of Rashomon is just slow, like watching a slideshow. Some just have the sound drop out – pause and restart, and the sound comes back. Some shorter things like music videos play right through. And some videos just stop, and bail back out to the menu.