Making The iPod Useful
The iPod, cultural icon, modern walkman, expensive hunk of metal and plastic.
Whatever your opinion on it, it’s a safe bet that you or someone you know owns one. I myself own a 5th generation iPod (the Video) and happen to think it’s really nice. The video capability is useful, but not its main purpose, and I like being able to transfer videos on there to watch on the bus or train.
Or at least I did. I can’t anymore, at least not using iTunes, because Apple has decided to try and break my iPod.
You see one nice ability of the iPod is to be able to play videos that are larger than the screen. This way I can transfer my DVD resolution copy of say, Donnie Darko, onto it and then if I want to output it to a TV from my iPod it will look really good. This means I don’t need to worry about having an iPod version of movies, just one MPEG4 video file.
However, I recently updated iTunes (to 6.0.2) and my iPod firmware (to 1.1) and video uploads stopped working. Now I got a message that “some of the songs in the iTunes library […] were not copied to the iPod because they cannot be played on this iPod”. I now had to get iTunes to “convert to ipod video” files that had been working (and transfering) properly before. What the hell…?
It wasn’t that the iPod couldn’t play the videos (far from it) it was simply that Apple had crippled the software. The iPod played them fine before. Is it iTunes, or a bugged firmware upgrade (v1.1)?
How Apple have worked out that removing useful functions of a product is a good thing I don’t know - the current version (at the time of writing anyhow) still has this problem. Great. Now I like iTunes as a music organiser, it makes uploading to my iPod simple, or did, so I’ll probably still use it. However the video problem meant I went looking for ways to make my iPod useful again. Not just for video, but in as many ways possible.
I was pleasantly surprsed.
Firstly I found a quick and simple way of “downgrading” my firmware to see if that was the problem. It wasn’t. While the firmware upgrade might have had its problems for some people, mine wasn’t one of them.
So I needed a way to copy files to and from the iPod. I’d used CopyPod before, but it was mostly useful for copying files from the iPod, not the other way around. After I little searching and much testing of trial versions I found Anapod Explorer.
Perfect! It integrates into Windows and functions just like a set of folders for each type of file. Nice, but I have to pay for it, and it doesn’t quite understand the difference between Music Videos and Movies. Hmm.
After a bit more searching I found YamiPod which, while not quite being what I was looking for, had the interesting feature of being able to run directly from my iPod. No installation, no registry entries. Just runs on any machine with my iPod connected. Now that I found very useful.
And so I began my decent into portable software.
It turns out there are a whole lot of portable applications out there. Most of them are designed to be run from USB sticks, but this has the happy side effect of meaning that they can also be run from an iPod.
Some of the best examples of useful portable applications come from PortableApps.com, which isn’t too surprising. Aside from cool portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, Abiword, and Filezilla - they have a nice suite of them, but I recomend the “lite” version as it is a lot smaller and frankly… you probably don’t need OpenOffice when you have AbiWord. I certainly don’t.
A nice addition to all these apps is PStart, which sort of functions as a startmenu for your portable apps, but in your system tray. Very useful, and certainly makes like easier.
These useful little programs have already come in useful for when I’m doing contract work: don’t have a some software on the machine I’m provided? Not a problem, just plug in the iPod.
So what have I learnt? Well, Apple has decided to try to retroactively break my iPod, doing more evil than Microsoft have ever done to me, but they have failed. A combination of iTunes and Anapod will have to do for now.
Also - I have found a way to make my iPod even more useful. Granted I could do the same on a USB stick, but why carry two things around? More portable programs can be found here - screw limitations, I want the most useful device possible. I’m sure you do too.
Spread the word, and let me know if you find anything useful yourselves.
on March 13th, 2006 at 8:49
Interestingly enough a friend of mine had setup a list of portable apps on his iPod, and this promted me to do the same on my own yesterday. Portableapps.com contains full scale apps that have been reengineered to run portably, but there are many other apps that run without any installer. Some of the most useful ones to me are uTorrent and XAMPP! With XAMPP I can have a full development environment on an iPod
on March 14th, 2006 at 14:11
I’ve had horrible luck with iPods. You can read my diatribe on them at the blog entry below.
http://bluelyte.sytes.net/blog/archive/27
Creative MuVo all the way now.
Just got a 256 MB with FX tuner for my birthday and I’m loving it.
on March 14th, 2006 at 14:13
I know plenty of people who’ve had problems with Creative products… so I guess it evens out.
In this case it’s not the ipod that is the problem, it’s iTunes. I suppose you could make a case for the stupid filesystem of the iPod being a problem… but it’s not really.
on March 14th, 2006 at 14:16
Hm, odd. I never had a problem with a Creative MuVo product, ever. I’ve still got one that I’ve had for two years now and it works perfectly. But yeah, the iTunes filesystem leaves a lot to be desired. With the Creative, I can treat it like a flash drive or MP3 player and it doesn’t care. I don’t have to partition it out to separate MP3 files from non-MP3 files. I don’t have to use third-party programs to force the iPod to let me organize it the way I want to. It just works.
on March 21st, 2006 at 2:12
hey this might be a little old but if you dont find a way to get videos back on ur pod i would suggest ipodlinux.org if you download podzilla to your ipod (any ipod) you can watch videos, play cool games like doom and half life, gameboy, mame, and atari games, the possibilities are endless so check it out
on March 21st, 2006 at 2:21
As far as I know ipodlinux doesn’t work on the 5th Gen’s at all, though they are working on it.
Plus I’d rather keep the ipod with its original software, especially as I can get videos on there, just not with itunes.
on September 22nd, 2006 at 6:45
I believe there are educational institutions that are taking the heed of making iPods useful particularly in Podcasting.
Podcasting, perhaps, can be a good medium towards learning. 