How To Download Movies Into Your iPod
The iPod is touted to be the single greatest invention ever to come out as far as multimedia handling is concerned. The day the first iPod came out, it was clear that Apple would be ahead of the mp3 market by light years. They took it a step further with the iPod video. And this is where it started to become a little more complicated.
For years, the iPod was known as an mp3 device and people marveled at the ease of use they experienced with one of these babies in their hands. These days, to buy an iPod means that you have to know how to use it. After all, the iPod of today handles more than just music. And that’s where the problem lies-some people are at a loss when it comes to syncing videos into their iPod videos.
The First Step
Of course, not all iPods can play videos so it goes without saying that you first need the right hardware to be able to view videos. Only iPod video models can actually play videos. What you want to do now is figure out what videos you want to place into your iPod and also check how much space you have left in your iPod. Videos are quite large and in the iPod format, a full movie can go over 400MB. That’s a lot of space and the more movies you want to store in it, the more space you will need.
Know The Format
Videos come in all sorts of sizes and formats. This is essential because some people think that if a video can be played on the computer, it can play on the iPod. This is far from the truth. iPods usually take in a format known as mpeg4; the file extension for this is mp4 and you must have stumbled upon that somewhere. This is the only format that the iPod plays so if you see a WMV, or an AVI, touch luck. These formats will not play on your iPod.
Conversion
It’s hard to find movies in the mpeg4 format because most are already on DVD and if there are any downloadable ones online (your legal choices are very few), they are in other formats. There is, however, a solution to all of this. You will need to use a movie converter. There are many different converters that you can buy online and some of them are free. Basically, these programs will convert WMV’s and AVI’s into the iPod format mpeg 4. Some examples of such programs are IMTOO iPod Movie converter, or even Lonely Cats SmartMovie Converter which is more or less used to convert movies into a mobile format such as the iPod. They are simple enough programs to use and most can be found with a search on a site like Google or Yahoo Search. There are also other programs that will allow you to convert some of your favorite DVDs into the mpeg4 format directly.
Transfer
Once you have figured out how to convert and have some files ready to transfer to your iPod, all you have to do is open iTunes and plug in your iPod video. Once it syncs, you can then click and drag the files into your iPod much like you would with music. It’s that simple and only a company like Apple could have made it that way.