Friday, July 27, 2007

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

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am totally sold on my 80MB video iPod. The quality of the video is just great and I can play the video on an ordinary TV and the quality is fine.

I now have a growing video resource of child created content and video from Teacher Tube and You Tube that has no outward links to unsavoury sites as they play thru the TV.

Being of a decent size I have also backed up my computer to my iPod and always have the files etc on hand when I am out and about.

Also I have audio books, children's stories,podcasts, contacts, passwords and notes, I have also set the clock in it to different time zones so I can check the times in different places.

I am sold on it.

A dear friend

It seems very apt to be writing this blog post in tribute to a dear, dear friend. The world has lost a true global educational  IT innovator...