iPod Bug - Video Plays on 30GB iPod but not 60GB

If you publish video destined for the iPod, you should know that there's a problem with the iPod 60GB Firmware Version 1.1 that affects playback of some H.264 videos.  I found this myself when I had encoded a SageTV-recorded episode of Battlestar Galactica.  My son popped it over to his 30GB iPod where it worked fine.  I moved a copy to my 60GB iPod, and found that it would play for about 30seconds, and then begin to skip and drop audio.    

Anyway, a little sniffing around reveals that very large H.264 files (over 100MB) that are encoded with some third-party MPEG encoders (the problem does not affect encodes using Quicktime Pro).  A discussion on FEWL.net summarizes the condition:

This problem only seems to affect the 5G 60Gb iPod

There have been no reports of this problem occurring on the 5G 30Gb iPod

The problem does not occur with content purchased from iTunes

The problem does not occur with content encoded with QuickTime and/or iTunes.

The problem only seems to occur with large video files (in excess of 100Mb)

The problem seems to occur most frequently with content encoded with Videora on PC, although other applications have shown this problem as well.

There have been few to no reports of this problem occurring for Mac users encoding with Handbrake.

Turns out that both Videora and the utility I used to convert the SageTV MPEG2 file to an H.264 are based on the open-source ffmpeg encoder.  Other encoders may be affected as well, so be sure to test your longer-format video on the 60GB iPod/Firmware 1.1.  Apparently, one workaround is to open an affected file with Quicktime Pro and re-export it as H.264.