Category: iPod

What’re you lookin’ at?

Well I thought it was interesting so here’s the top 10 posts on nerd. by number of views (based on the last 500 page hits courtesy of Statcounter.com).

  1. Review: Why the Netgear WG311 v3 Sucks (72)
    Slightly dodgy network card that Netgear don’t seem that fussed about fixing. Bad on XP, it got worse on Vista (see number 4).
  2. Playing iPod Video on Your TV (45)
    Seems to be a lot of people looking for instructions for the iPod Classic. Here’s a tip: sell it.
  3. Server application unavailable: installing IIS on .NET 2.0 (44)
    Seems to be a common problem. Sadly Microsoft’s error message is about as relevant as ever.
  4. Installing Vista (AKA More Netgear WG311 Misery) (31)
    Even more messed up. Thank goodness for Linksys!
  5. Thunderbird/Outlook/Google Calendar Integration (25)
    How to integrate your Thunderbird calendar at home with your Outlook in work, via Google Calendar.
  6. Orange Answerphone (Voicemail) Number for PAYG (23)
    Such a simple problem. Who knew it would be so hard to find?
  7. Stop Monitor.exe Hogging CPU (20)
    Why can’t people just give you a standard installation instead of trying to do everything for you? Help sounds good, until their useful tools start killing your PC.
  8. How to run IIS Web Server in Windows XP Home (20)
    Microsoft’s official line is it can’t be done, but it’s not that tricky.
  9. Making Firefox Scroll With Syanptics TouchPad (19)
    Discovering the solution to making Firefox scroll on my Acer Aspire laptop.
  10. NAS or Home Server (17)
    I deliberate over whether I can justify spending the extra to build or buy a home server before eventually deciding that a Linkstation Live will meet my needs for less than half the price.

£169 iPhone Still £169 Too Expensive

O2 have slashed the cost of owning the Apple iPhone (8GB model only). It’s down from £269 to £169. The same deal is also available at the Carphone Warehouse. Good news I’m sure, but you’d still have to be mad to pay a penny for the damn thing on top of the £35 × 18 = £630 of a minimum contract when you can get Nokia’s N95 8GB (which I have been seriously coveting for months) for “free” at that price (then again, without any kind of data plan that’s extortionate too).

Maybe if my N73 breaks I’ll consider upgrading, but since I’m spending a tenner a month on pay-as-you-go I can’t really justify jumping to £35/month for the N95 8GB or to £44 a month for an iPhone.  Maybe if I hold out long enough…

Time Competition Commission looked at Apple

Being a small player struggling in a market dominated by a single juggernaut is something you’d expect Apple to have sympathy for, but apparently this is not so. The slap on the wrist Microsoft received from the EU Competition Commission for abusing it’s monopoly to stifle competition has just been upheld in court and you’d expect Apple, as one of their competitors in the market concerned, to be pleased. Then again, Apple seem to be getting pretty good at this abuse of monopoly thing themselves, and there are already calls that the EU Competition Commissioner should move on to Apple.

Continue reading “Time Competition Commission looked at Apple”

Playing iPod Video on Your TV

Please note that this entry is about my 5G iPod Video.  Information may not apply to other models like the iPod Classic.

Getting video files to play on your TV from your iPod is actually a lot easier than I imagined it would be. If you have AVI files that you couldn’t be bothered burning to VCD/SVCD or DVD, a much friendlier alternative is to play download them to your iPod. There are two hurdles you’ll have to overcome, but in reality, the process is much more painless than converting the files to MPEG and burning them to a CD or DVD is.

Converting Your Video

Before you put a video on your iPod you will need to convert it to an iPod friendly format. For this I recommend the free program, Videora iPod Converter. This will convert your DivX or Xvid AVI files into an iPod-friendly MPEG-4 file; I recommend the highest bitrate 1500kbps setting.

That’s it; easy! I’ve found that the time taken to convert a video file using Videora is slightly less than the play time of that video. A 2 hour video file should be converted in about 1 hour 25 minutes.

Playing On Your TV

When Apple released their video iPod they released a special AV cable for it that would connect your iPod to the red, yellow and white AV sockets on your TV, allowing you to watch the videos on your iPod on a larger screen. As it turns out, this was a bit of a scam. All they did was take a standard RCA-to-AV lead (commonly used for connecting camcorders to TVs) and send the video over the red cable (which usually carries sound) instead of the yellow one. This means that you can use a standard RCA-to-AV lead if you have one kicking about – just connect the red plug to the yellow socket, yellow plug to the white socket and white plug to the red socket. Scumbags, eh?

Don’t panic if you, like me, don’t own a camcorder and don’t already have an RCA-to-AV lead. You can buy one specially colour-coded for iPods (so red goes to red etc.) off eBay, where I got mine for £3.73 including postage!

Then it’s really simple, just go into your iPod video folder and set the Video Settings to output to TV, connect it up and you’re away.