Filed under: iPod Family, Hacks, Open Source
Video on the iPod nano
The iPod Linux Video Player now supports the iPod nano. Sure, the videos aren't even up to the paltry 320x240 h.264 quality that Lost episodes come in, as this little trick can only play specially encoded AVI files, but it does have both video and audio working on the nano.
So, if you impressed your friends last week by rocking out Doom on your nano, then you already have Linux installed on your iPod and you're good to go and wow them again with the video player. If not, then you're going to have to take the few extra steps of installing Linux and possibly voiding your nano's warranty. If you give it a shot, let us know how it looks on that itsy bitsy screen.
[via Engadget]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Adriaan Akkermans said 11:52AM on 11-16-2005
I still can't find an installer for the iPod Nano ... Where can I download it???
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Mark said 1:17PM on 11-16-2005
there is no installer. you have to do it from commandline.
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Adriaan Akkermans said 4:43PM on 11-16-2005
is there some how-to, or something like that? I have never worked with command line before...
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Liam said 6:29PM on 11-16-2005
linux should really make automoater actions for people to use for these things
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flowolf said 6:23AM on 11-18-2005
i succeeded in setting up a linux on my ipod nano.
yes with video. :)
follow these instructions: http://opax.swin.edu.au/~reino/nanolinux.htm
maybe i will post a report in my blog later...
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DCE said 11:54AM on 11-25-2005
I'm pleased to report that this hack works quite well. But you'll need to be a bit familiar with the command line. If you're not, this should provide a great opportunity to get into it. Remember that you can always reinstall the iPod firmware to set things right if you screw up. That said, there are a few things to be aware of.
While the iPod nano/photo/etc can indeed play video, the only format currently supported is uncompressed .avi. This means that files - even short ones - will be extremely large. A 30 minute file that would be about 100mb on your desktop at full resolution could be as large as a gigabyte once on your iPod. In the case of a nano, this amounts to a quarter of your memory!
Still, it's a neat trick, and I suspect compressed formats will be supported in the near future.
Also: mencoder, the command line app required to convert files into the supported format currently suffers from a bug that renders the colors of the video all wrong - I was able to get playable video on my nano, but the colors were terribly off. But it's likely this will be corrected soon as well.
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aegray said 2:14AM on 11-30-2005
Mencoder only has that bug on OSX
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matt said 6:53PM on 12-06-2005
ok cool, but is there a way to get it on there from windows?, if so how?
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