Tailor-Made Infosession Fridays: How do you like your Video IPod...?

You get a car, so you can drive it... You get a shirt, so you can wear it... You get an IPOD, so you can listen to music on it... You get a Video IPOD, so you can listen to music AND watch videos on it... right...? But the answer is usually NO.

You'd be surprised... but most of us 'gotta have my gadget freaks' dont even know where to get videos for their IPods from, let alone be able to transfer them and actually watch them on there. For example, I didn't know how to do this until I wrote this post!! Well, fear no more... after reading this post, you should know exactly how you can do this... leaving only your own inertia in between you and your watching video on your Video IPod!

Q. Where can I get material to play on my Video Ipod?
A. Almost any source of video can be played on your video Ipod. You can go the basic route and just use i-Tunes to obtain music videos, short movies, or videos of popluar tv shows. You can also use various other types of software to transfer dvds, or digital videos from your personal collection so that they can be played on your ipod.

Q. How do I get content from the i-Tunes site, is it free, what's the catch?
A. i-Tune delivers to you video material that you will 'own' at the end. Hence, they charge $1.99 for every video you download and buy from their site. You can treat this videos as you would treat songs had you downloaded them from i-Tunes. This is a simple, a bit costly, but an effective solution.

Q. I'm cheap, and I don't want to pay for music videos or tv shows. How can I put full-lenght DVDs on my Video IPod?
A. Well, the good news is, you can bypass i-Tunes all-together, however, you will need to use another type of software that can convert various different formats (DVD, Tivo, DivX Video, MPEG, WMV, AVI, RealMedia, etc) into IPod video. Some of these softwares are free, and some you have to buy. You basically pay for what you get. Here is a great step-by-step article from C-NET about doing this. I couldn't have explained it any better myself. It also describes how to use the best software for this type of application, the AVS Video Converter.

Q. Ok, that's all good, but what if I don't really want to put movies on my IPod.. what if I just want to transfer video clips from my cpu to my Ipod?
A. In this case, if you videos are in MOV, MPEG or MP4 format, all you have to do is use the free conversion tool on the i-Tune site. Yes, its free!

Any more questions.... send 'em my way using the 'comments' field.

By the way, if you didn't like CNet's explanation using AVS for some reason, here are six other popular video conversion tools you can invest in.

Also, if you just want to give this a try before you buy, or you simply don't want to spend any money, here is a free video conversion software you can try.

Though this isn't a complete and technical discussion on how to get video on your Ipod, this should give you the basics, and set you on the right path.

Hope this helps! Have a good weekend! :)