Full disclosure: Santa bribed me with a Video iPod for Christmas. 🙂 What do I think so far? I like it. Here’s some of what I learned during my first week of using the iPod to watch videos.
Let me start at the beginning. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I have to admit I got tripped up opening the box. Yep. Opening the box. The Video iPod is packaged in a very plain black box that opens in the middle like a book. This part I could handle. I also was easily able to pull the iPod out of the cutout in the right half of the box. What tripped me up was unboxing the accessories. It took me a minute or so to realize that the top side of the left part of the box could be flipped open. There were some icons on the top edge of the box that provided some clues, but I didn’t notice them. I guess I needed some brain food before opening my presents.
Once I got the Video iPod and its accessories out of the box, I was ready to go. I turned on the iPod to check out any samples it may have. None. Not a welcoming video cast or anything. So much for instant gratification.
I set aside the iPod and went back to Christmas.
About an hour later I decided it was time to try downloading a video or something onto the iPod. First I had to install iTunes. That worked OK.
Now where to get some video content? I had an iTunes card so I could use that, but doesn’t there seem like there should be a sample somewhere, just to get things working. I don’t want to have to sign up for anything. I just want to watch a video.
I decided to look for a video blog posting. Hmmm. But which ones support the iPod? After all of 15 seconds of checking, I decided to try a movie instead. The quick change was probably a mistake. I should have given myself at least another 15 seconds.
Layne gave me a link to a program to encode a video for the iPod format. An hour later I had a file. I tried dragging it into the iTunes Library. Blue screen. I was running Vista and evidently I ran into some kind of nasty bug. Who knows, I have so many beta drivers on my Tablet, I didn’t look too deep.
It was iMac time. I booted the iMac up, downloaded some video encoding software and then after an hour or so I had my video. Didn’t work. Encoding error. I tried again. Same problem. Hmmm. Probably the software I was using.
(I forgot to mention that all the time that the iPod is connected to a PC it flashes “Do not disconnect” or something similar. Huh? I haven’t done anything yet. Why can’t I disconnect it? Maybe a hint as to how to disconnect would be nice. I Googled online and I could see others were having the same problem with this overly aggressive message.)
I was getting ready to set everything aside and then Bob came to the rescue. He had some videos on his iPod. They worked. Of course, he’d downloaded them from the iTunes store. I thought about going that way again. But I didn’t.
A few minutes of head scratching later, and we decided to try encoding just one chapter of a movie. It worked. Whew, I was watching my first movie on the iPod. Not bad. It only took till the second day.
Now it was iTunes store time. I purchased a couple TV shows. All was good.
What are my impressions of the video quality? There’s no doubt that the display is small–particularly for displaying anything that’s in a widescreen format. Otherwise, the size of the screen and the size of the iPod are not too bad. I like the larger display size of the Zune, but I can get by with the iPod’s current size. Actually, for standard format TV shows the size works very well.
I still haven’t downloaded any webcasts, although viewing webcasts is at the top of my list of how I want to use the iPod. Funny how that happens.
