If I record programmes on my laptop via a USB box receiving freeview, how long would it take to convert the mpeg 4 to a recognised IPOD format?

depends what program you use

As well as ....

The quality of the recording to be converted
The speed of your processor
The amount of RAM available on your PC
The quality you want to convert to
The length of the program recorded

ok, so this is the score: igb ram, AMD Sempron 64 3200+ 1.6GHz processor 1/2 hour program to IPOD recognised format, how long would that take to convert mpeg4 to ipod