*grumble* I just found out that all of season 3 and season 4 of The Shield that I encoded for my iPod will not work on said iPod. I had one little setting wrong. So here is a reference for me and anyone else who cares.

Under Destination: File Format=MP4 Codecs=AVC/H.264

Under Video: Framerate=Same Encoder=x264 Baseline Set Average bitrate=400 Select 2-pass encoding

Click Picture settings and reduce pixel count to 320×240.

Main Profile for x264 will not work at all on the iPod. It needs to be the Baseline Profile. Well the good news is that this new iMac encodes pretty quickly.