How to get video onto your iPod

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Video Podcasts

Apple is already serving up video Podcasts – essentially home-made TV shows that you can download for free from the iTunes Music Store. We’d certainly advise subscribing to Tiki Bar TV, hilarious five minutes episodes based around a cocktail recipe. We’re confident that they’ll be some more gems – among the inevitable rubbish – very soon.

DVDs

It’s illegal to rip movies off DVD discs, even if you own them, so we wouldn’t recommend downloading the $20 Media Studio software for Windows from Makayama.com. Because it would be very naughty to copy your films straight to your iPod. Very naughty indeed.

Video search

Over at wired.com, they’re reporting that a new video search service called Guba will convert video files to iPod format – and it searches a vast database of TV recordings and porn movies held on the ancient Usenet system. Guba costs $15 a month and is in a legal grey area – they don’t own the content, but they do delist videos at the request of the copyright holder. Which probably means there won’t be much up there for long…

The specs

If you have your own home movie content, or want to export from another video applications, here’s the full detail of what the iPod will support:

H.264 video (in .m4v, .mp4 or .mov file formats):

• up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3

• audio in AAC-LC format up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo

MPEG-4 video (in .m4v, .mp4 or .mov file formats):

• up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile

• audio in AAC-LC format up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo