Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Apple Archive

Converting Video and Adding Album Art for Your iPod

- 2006.01.17

Earlier this month I discussed how Apple was cutting costs in their new video iPod without really adding very many features outside of the ability to watch videos.

Transferring videos to the iPod is done by iTunes, much as you'd transfer a song - just drag the video to the iPod icon in the source list.

Videos can be added to iTunes in two ways. You can download them for $1.99 from the iTunes Music Store, or you can import your own videos. Since Apple would prefer if you downloaded and paid for their videos, they make it a bit more difficult to convert and import your own videos into iTunes.

Video to iPod

Apple's way of having you to do it involves using QuickTime 7 and exporting your MPEG file to the iPod format via a menu option (in a break with the past, you no longer need to buy the Pro version of QuickTime to convert to iPod format). However, this seems to take a long time, and on my 867 MHz 12" PowerBook it sometimes stops halfway with a timeout error.

 

This leads me to standalone applications. The first one I found is MoviesformyPod, which gives you some options for quality as well as the option to rotate the video that you're converting.

I had no problems with it stopping halfway, but I had issues with some of the files not having audio (and the software itself warns that it cannot convert the audio in muxed MPEG files). If you're like me and have a number of these files you want to play on your video iPod, you might try iSquint.

 

Like MoviesformyPod, iSquint gives you some choice over quality settings, which affects file size. However, it also gives you some advanced settings where you can crop the movie, change the frame rate, and even change the bitrate for the audio.

It also gives you the opportunity to have a list of several files you want converted to the iPod format so you don't need to manually go back and convert each one. And, if you want, iSquint will even automatically add the movie files to iTunes for you.

But you're still not done, because you'll have to tell iTunes whether the video you just converted is a music video or a movie. If it's a music video, "get info" on the video, choose options, and select "music video". The iPod will even play the audio track alone if you access it by going to the "music" menu and not the "video" menu. You can name the file by artist and title like you would any MP3 file.

Album Cover Art

The other thing you can do with color-screen iPods is copy over album artwork - but in order do that, you must first have the artwork applied to the songs in iTunes. To do this you could scan the cover of all of your CDs, but I've found that I can usually find a roughly 300 x 300 JPEG of the cover of any given album by using an image search engine.

 

Copy that to your desktop, make sure that Show Artwork is selected in iTunes from the Edit menu (and above the window is showing Selected Song, not Now Playing), select the songs you want the album art to be applied to, and drag the image file into the album artwork window. Now when you copy these songs to your color iPod, you'll be able to see them on the iPod's screen when a song from that album is playing. Push the center button on the iPod's scroll wheel twice, and you'll get a large-sized display of the artwork alone. LEM

Recent Apple Archive articles

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

Recent Deals

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Apple Archive articles copyright ©2000-07 by Adam Robert Guha. Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2010 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

Custom Search

Amazon.com

Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Video Cards
Email Lists

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
B&H
MacMall
TechRestore
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Low End Mac's Amazon.com store

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.