bad apples
A bit back, I caved and bought an iPod. Because my car is set up for one. Integrates nicely with the stereo. I decided to put a few movies we’d taken on vacations on there so I’d have them if someone wanted to see them.
But you know what an iPod classic won’t do? Play .mov files. Yes, their hardware won’t play their file format.
Fail.
July 9th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Yeah, I found that out too.
Have you tried 3GP Convertor? You can convert most video files to iPod compatible format quite easily.
Dunno if it works with the classic though, I have an old Video version.
July 9th, 2010 at 11:48 am
I had to look this up myself, too. If I understood what I read correctly, this is because “.mov” is actually a container file for compressed data, like “.zip”. Depending on what software tool was used to put the stuff into the .mov file the iPod may or may not be able to run it.
Apparently converting needs to be done. I had to do that with all of my .wmv to get them to run on my Mylo which said it supported .wmv, but apparently not old .wmv.
Isn’t it good that we have electronics to make our lives hassle-free?
July 9th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Like Tam said, .mov is just the container. The actual codec that the video was encoded with is what’s really important to the iPod or any video player.
And, the iPod is going to play most nicely with H.264 encoded video. Transcode it and you should be fine.
July 9th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Just run it through your Flux Capacitor.
July 9th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Try Handbrake (www.handbrake.fr) for encoding your videos. Has easy to use choices for iPods and some other media players. There are Mac & PC versions. And it’s free.
I use it sometimes for ripping my DVDs to my iPod.
July 9th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
All I can say is technology. I use quicktime pro to convert my videos to iPod format and it is pretty painless. I have videos of both of the kids doing gymnastics for the same reason.
July 9th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Actually used Handbrake today to convert some DVDs for my iPad.
July 9th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Two words: Apple.Sucks.
July 10th, 2010 at 2:18 am
In iTunes, did you try in the pulldown menus (with the .mov file entry highlighted, of course):
Advanced… Create iPod or iPhone version
?
For me it made an .m4v file which had no problem on my iPod (5th gen)
July 10th, 2010 at 9:30 am
I stopped having any faith in Apple or their products when their hardware did not work with the software it was bundled with.
That takes a special level of stupid.
July 10th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
I’m a pretty big proponent of Apple and most of their products, but this is the one area that just makes me want to bash my head into the wall.
Especially with the iPad, which was practically designed to watch video. I’ve got about 6-7 gigs worth of videos on my Macbook Pro. All of them play just fine in the stock version of Quicktime that comes with Snow Leopard, all of them can be viewed inside iTunes itself. Not a SINGLE DAMN ONE can port over.
Does transcoding work, yes. And I’ve used Handbrake in the past….but having to lock up my system for the better part of two days to do all that transcoding? Not to mention that you’re pretty much screwed if you want to view any subtitled videos that don’t have them burned into the image itself. And having to dump pretty much any video I would ever download from the internet into Handbrake before I add it to iTunes to port over. Sorry…that goes beyond fail at that point.