I had a slightly unusual request by e-mail the other day from a friend of mine, Chris Fuller of the Edgehill College Spanish Podcasts( check out Chris's European Championship Football -Soccer - wiki). Chris is currently wondering whether or not to spend his hard earned expenses ( thank you British Council ) on a video iPod or not ( friends also have iRivers!).
Chris's email contained a windows media file attachment of animals names in Spanish, he asked if i could put the file ontot the iPod and play it!!!???
Initially my answer was 'Sorry no!' my Mac won't even recognise the file extension, let alone place the fiel into iTunes!!!
I remembered then that a week or so ago Chris had blogged about the file conversion site Zamzar, here was an excellent opportunity to see if it could handle the task. The file was duly uploaded to My documents, browsed for in Zamzar - converted to .mov ( I also converted it to MP4 just in case). A quick conversion - followed by a few minutes wait for an email with the link - hey presto file found and set to open with iTunes.
I guess wit the whole operation taking around 10 minutes, the file was synced with the iPod and Chris's words and slideshow running on the video screen - Well Done Zamzar, and all thanks really to Chris for asking the question and for giving the answer :)
** amendment to post 11.25pm Friday 27th July **
Following a conversation with Allanah King in New Zealand who was kind enough to leave a comment earlier regarding her 80GB iPod, we were discussing downloading video to the iPod and AK suggested an online converter that she uses called Vixy. Vixy is still in Beta form and is a bit temperamental but will easily convert YouTube or TeacherTube - or I guess SlideCast video's to a form which you can then open in iTunes and sync to the iPod.
Yet another plus point for the iPod - Thanks Allanah