The Video iPod
I just purchased a demo video iPod from Small Dog Electronics. It's got a couple scratches but hey, it's a demo unit, I cannot really complain. It's in pretty good condition, as a matter a fact I think I am the one who tested and made sure this iPod works, so now I really can't complain! It's 30GB and black.

The reason I bought this was because I was testing another video iPod and I actually was watching Aeon Flux on it. I know many people were complaining about how small the screen in and crap like that, but it's really not that bad. I have had a Sony PSP for about a year now and even though that screen is noticibly larger then the video iPod, I can manage watching full length movies on here. Poo poo on the people that complain it's too small. If it's too small then don't watch movies on it, don't buy one, stop complaining, jeez.

So the reason for buying this was to obviously watch movies. In order to do that I have to convert them into a format that can be read by the iPod! I know when the iPod video first came out that a bunch of Apple sites ran articles on which programs to use for this sort of thing. Of course the searches provided on those sites/blogs are horrible so I wound up using good ole' Google. I came across one application which is 100% and works great called, iSquint. You can view the programs home page here. it converts tons of different video types without the need of installing the extra codecs. It took me about 1 hour to convert The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe AND The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on my PowerMac G4 1.25GHz DP machine. So I am pretty psyched about that.

But what if I have a DVD that I want to convert to something usable by the iPod. Whenever I've done a DVD-RiP I have used Handbrake. It has always created the best rips for me and it is so simple to use. Click, click, wait, done! So I searched up Handbrake on Google and found their home page. Apparently they have a nice little program which is based from Handbrake but converts just for iPod and Sony PSP!! It's called Instant Handbrake and works mostly like the original version but makes video files just for the iPod and PSP. So now I am ripping Seabiscuit and it says it's going to take 3 hours which seems a little much. Usually it only takes and hour to do this...so we'll see.

Overall I am very impressed with the video iPod. It's great for on the go or just watching movies at my desk here...even at the retail price of $299 for the 30GB it's a great gadget. Now I can watch video podcasts too!

Update: I've been getting some videos from Gamespot.com and they're all in WMV format which doesn't really play nice with Windows media files. I tried to use iSquint to convert it since the iSquint website said it worked with WMV files, but it really doesn't so don't let that fool you. Maybe it's just the WMV9 codec or something, who knows. So I went through 10 other Mac based applications that said they would work with WMV files and they didn't. So I figured well, maybe Microsoft Windows would play nice with its own types of files.

I borrowed my girlfriends Dell with Windows XP SP2 and installed this application called WinAVI, which was free and quite easy to use. It worked perfectly fine and then I put the videos on my iPod.

Now there is one non-free program for Mac called Flip4Mac and it says it can convert WMV files into something the Mac can better read, but I believe it costs about $30 that I don't have...plus most of my movies aren't WMV format.