Three Cool Things To Do With Your New iPod With Video
So Santa brought you a shiny new iPod with video for Christmas and now you want to know what kind of cool things you can do with it. Of course you can purchase tons of awesome video from the iTunes music store but that is only just the beginning of all the fun things you can do with your new iPod!
Like many of you, I also found an iPod video under the tree this Christmas and quickly began to sort out how to get video content onto the device. I have lots of video from the iTunes store, which easily downloaded with no problems, but I also have lots of DVDs and other video that I also wanted to download to the iPod. This task, along with several other suggestions prompted me to share three cool tips for your new iPod video.
1. Find More Video Podcasts – As you may have already discovered, the iTunes store has lots of interesting podcasts for you to download. However, the interface leaves much to be desired in sorting out the video podcasts and the selection is not that extensive. I did manage to find several sites that had much larger lists of video podcasts:
Podcast Alley
Yahoo Podcasts
Podshow
Podguide
2. Download DVDs (and other formats) to your iPod – One of the first things I wanted to do with my video iPod was to convert several of my DVDs to iPod video format so I could watch them on the go. I quickly figured out that iTunes does not have a “rip” feature for DVDs so I decided to see if I could find some freeware software that could do the job. So far the best software (on Mac) that I have found is a small program called Instant Handbrake. Strange names aside, this program works like a charm to quickly convert your DVD videos to the native format used on the iPod. The quality looks great with no audio problems whatsoever. For those who want more control over the conversion process you can download the full version of Handbrake which will allow you to adjust things more to your personal tastes. If you don’t find Handbrake to your liking you can try another alternative called MovieToGo from Digigami. On the Windows platform you might try iPod Video Converter + DVD from Cucusoft.
3. Plug your iPod into your TV – As cool and nifty as watching video is on the iPod, its much more fun to watch your videos up on the big screen. Unless you connect your computer to your TV you won’t have the ability to use iTunes itself for watching video, but you can purchase a universal dock from Apple that will allow you to plug into any TV with an S-Video connector. I tried this out on my 27” LCD with great results. The video worked right away and the included remote worked ok for pause, rewind, and fast-forward of whatever video I was watching. My only gripe is the lack of a user interface display for the TV when the iPod is plugged in. This would make finding the video you want to play much easier vs. having to locate it on the iPod itself.
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Wow! Thanks for the article.. I think I’ll try those myself.
Thanks for sharing your article with us. I got a ipad recently, and I use movie to ipad converter to convert my movie to ipad. It is useful to me.