I went to Circuit City Saturday and bought an iPod Classic! Why? A couple of reasons:
- Aaron and I just got paid another sum of money for advertising on our podcast.
- My old Nano was overfilling, and my library (including podcasts) was over 10GB.
- I got tired of seeing so many “convert to iPod” things on YouTube downloaders, DVD rippers and video conversion applications.
- I want videos on my iPod!
16GB would probably do for the Touch but it’s $450! I’d rather spend $250 for a slightly smaller screen and 5 times the space which is virtually unlimited from my point of view:
But I know that I’ll eventually fill up at least half of that. It’s Steve’s Law: If you continue to add music to your iPod indefinitely, eventually you will meet any capacity. (And have to buy a new one.)
The only downside: It’s the last and only (I think… not sure about the Shuffle) iPod to be based on hard drive memory instead of flash drive. Result: Slow. Videos take a few seconds to load and scrolling through music is painful after becoming used to the super-fast Nano (which I still have and plan to keep.)
Still, the new interface is great, and as you can see above I’ve been adding videos from many different places using some awesome free applications…
The first application that I’ve been using to get movies and TV shows onto my iPod is…
Handbrake is a fantastic DVD ripper. You insert your DVD into the computer, start up Handbrake, and it gives you tons of settings includind an iPod preset. You just click that, and it usually rips and 2 hour movie in about an hour.
Then you drag the .mp4 file into iTunes and sync it to your iPod.
TubeTV is the easiest way to get YouTube movies onto your iPod. All I had to do was set a few options, browse to YouTube with it’s built-in browser and click “save.” It converts it to an .flv file, and then that to a .mp4.
Plus, the application looks great and has some nice extras.
For all the videos already on my computer (movies that I’ve made or for some reason have downloaded in the past) that aren’t formatted correctly, there’s the incredibly relialbe iSquint. Give it the file location, and it’s does it instantly.
Fast, free and easy.
All of the apps mentioned above are for Mac (sorry) and completely free. (Although iSquint is a stripped-down version of a not-free program it’s still fully functional.)
Nice! The classic is the ONLY disk based iPod Apple still makes. One of the rumor sites thinks there will be a disk-based iPod Touch.
Since I got my iPhone, I haven’t used my 80Gb iPod. It’s just more convenient to carry one device that does everything, even if I can’t fit my entire music & video collection on it.
I like VisualHub to convert videos for iPod & iPhone (it also supports PSP).
I am just not in the cult. I love/hate the ipod (your old 4gb one). I’ve tried 3 different 3rd party apps to sync, and they all have shortcomings. I finally went back to iTunes and use it to click and drag, but my ipod DB is corrupted a little and there are podcasts listed in the directory that I can’t play or remove. I can’t find a repair function in iTunes. One of the 3rd party apps had a good repair function, but it is shareware and it expired on me after 30 days.
I had collected about 3.4gb of really diverse music on the ipod, and the shuffle function was really fun, and entertaining. But then it got corrupted and wouldn’t play anything, and I had to wipe it out and never tried to rebuild that collection. I can’t just sync to my hard drive, because I have a lot more than 4GB of music, much of it is not tagged, and a lot of it is tutorial music for my singing ventures. Besides, I had a lot of tunes collected on the ipod that are not on my hard drive at home. they are lost now. So now I just use the ipod for podcasts.
However, I’m not using itunes podcast functions because I’ve got another podcast manager with all my subscriptions set in it. So podcasts are loaded like music files. here’s the good and the bad:
IPOD BAD
Can’t uncorrupt database;
Can’t delete anything using ipod interface;
Must use Itunes to manage files;
Can’t read filenames in the ipod;
battery life about 4 hrs and diminishing
IPOD GOOD
Great interface, really easy to use while running or driving;
4GB capacity;
It is cool;
Starts up podcasts where it left off (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT*)
That last one is the predominant reason I keep using the ipod. I have 4 other mp3 players, and 3 of them will not pick up in the middle of a partially listened file. They all start back at the beginning. And my 4th mp3 player has a short that causes one channel to cut in and out.
And because I can’t delete files on the ipod, I’m constantly writing little notes to myself of what I’ve listened to and what I haven’t so that I can delete the right the files when I eventually hook up to iTunes. That just sucks.
BTW, I don’t use playlists. I haven’t figured that out. Maybe that would help with some of my file management problems.
grumble grumble,
UB