I just got an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) account. With EC2 and Simple Storage Service (S3), I think I can convert my DVDs into iPod-video-sized files much more quickly than my desktop and laptop could do. Here’s one person’s experience with doing the conversion using FFmpeg. He estimates that it costs well under a dollar to convert several video clips, and that the process can be parallelized. This would be really cool to have, and I have plenty of time. My media box doesn’t even ship until June 11.
See more progress on: rip all my TV show DVDs to my iPod video