Headline Feeds
Let me confess at the outset here that I'm a hopeless tubehead. If you need someone to defend watching television, I'm your man. I've even flirted -- but only flirted -- with buying installments of "Battlestar Gallactica" from the iTunes store for US$1.99 a pop.
Buying television episodes. That's the kind of thing that ricochets inside a gadget fan's noodle when he has a new piece of hardware with a fancy new feature that he's more desperate than Terry Hatcher to shamelessly exploit.
Not that there's anything wrong with buying television episodes -- my DVD library has its share of full season boxed sets -- but it seems that just as I can make music content for my iPod outside the confines of the iTunes store, I should be able to spawn video content, too.
And I can, with programs like Videora iPod Converter and Super DVD-to-iPod Converter.
Fussless Software
What's nice about both programs is that they work without a lot of fuss.
The Videora application, which is freeware, has a simple interface.
From a navigation pane on the left side of the main window, you can adjust the software's settings and convert files.
There are simple settings -- such as where you want converted files stored on your system -- to more complicated ones for creating profiles for determining the quality of a converted video.
Home Movies on Vidpod
Once you've chosen your settings, click "convert" in the navigation pane to call up the conversion pane.In that pane, you click "Transcode Video" to browse to the files you want converted. The terminology here -- Transcode Video -- isn't very intuitive. I mean, something like "open file" would be a lot easier to understand.
When the program accesses the file you want converted, the file's title and the profile that will be used for the conversion appear in a box beside the Transcode Video button. You can give the video a new title and change the profile, if you want to. Then just click "start" and the program creates an MPEG4 file that will play on an iPod that supports video.
I converted some home videos that were in AVI format and some shot with one of those CVS reusable video cameras, and they worked quite nicely in my iPod.
DVD for Small Screen
The Videora application will also convert movies ripped from a DVD into a format digestible by an iPod.The problem there, though, is ripping the movies in the first place. There are instructions for doing that at the Videora Web site, but they call for the use of a program called DVD Decrypter. According to a forum at one of the download sites for that program, the intellectual rights to the application were sold to Macrovision, which makes copy-protection software, and that company has taken the program out of circulation.
Unlike the Videora software, Super DVD-to-iPod Converter ($39.95), which is made by Lenogo Software, is strictly for converting DVDs to vidpod files.
Before you can do any converting -- at least any converting of movie DVDs, anyway -- you'll need to rip the discs. There are programs for doing that distributed on the Internet, although their legality is in the realm of grey law.
Content Galore
However, if you do find a way to rip a movie you own to disk, Super DVD will do an excellent job of converting it to vidpod format. While I'm not entirely sold on watching a widescreen film on the iPod's small screen, the stereo soundtrack of the movie that I converted for the device was resplendent.
Super DVD also came in handy with my new DVD video recorder. The hardware allows me to record TV shows to DVDs; the software allows me to send them to my iPod -- and I don't have to pay the iTunes store a penny.
If you balked at buying a video iPod because you wondered if there would be enough content to watch on it, you can put your hesitation to rest. There'll be plenty of content to watch when you can create your own with programs like Videora iPod Converter and Super DVD-to-iPod Converter.
Talkback: 
