8 easy steps to put Internet video on your iPod

>er, ummm, do you mean to tell me you have to buy a third party >app to put video on the new iPod??? Its just another file type! Umm... if it's streaming, how do you propose that you put it on an iPod? It's not "just another file type"; your computer doesn't store streaming video as a file, which is the entire point of streaming. Once again, it's *streaming*. "Streaming*. The author of this article is using Snapz Pro to turn something that is fleeting and non-permanent into an actual real file. After that, do what you want with it.

Make sure your screensaver is switched off too. You might be careful enough to walk away and leave the computer doing its thing without interrupting it or opening anything, but a screensaver will quietly and happily ruin the whole thing.

Whoa, Ryan, chill out with the negativity dude. Those are all good suggestions, but I don't know how well it would work with Google Video, which is what I was converting when I did this little trick. Also, to edit with Flip4Mac costs a bit. If someone already has Snapz Pro X, then this isn't that crazy of a way to do it. I mean it does get the job done. It's how I grabbed this Fred Rogers interview (http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22Academy+of+Television%22+%22fred+rogers%22)

I like checking out TUAW on a daily basis to see if there's some interesting tidbit I hadn't heard about, but quite often now I just laugh and then hang my head in shame at some of the posts that come along. Such is the case today. And the way you defend it in the comments just digs a deeper hole. Are you serious? Buy a $70 app to screen capture streaming video? You're dealing with the mac crowd here. People that care about aesthetics and quality. You're suggesting to essentially make a dub of a dub of a dub, or re-compress a jpeg to make it smaller and then send it to print, or take 128kbs mpeg and convert it to a 128kbs mp4 for the sake of having mp4. Each instance just makes it worse, and for what end result? Why not be a little more serious and talk about using VLC or mplayer to do a dumpstream and then be a little more serious with some CLI kung fu. It's not hard and I would tend to think that the hoops you routinely jump through are far harder than one line of code in the terminal, or ticking off a couple check boxes for the gui inclined. The hardest part may be explaining how to find the stream url in the source code of the html page. Because then you have, regardless of which route you take, the ACTUAL file that was being served up that has no generational loss and best of all, faster than real time rips since it downloads it as fast as your pipe can handle and writes it to disk instead of trying to display it. Open that in QuickTIme Player and export to iPod if need be. If it's WMV, you can use many a free programs out there to convert it, including VLC itself, or buy Flip4Mac if you want little hassle and export it right in QuickTime Player for the iPod. And it's still cheaper than buying snapz pro and provides better results that has no minimum system requirements.

To everyone hating on these steps.... this is *specifically* for grabbing video that you cannot download: like streaming video on the web or flash animations, etc. Thus the INTERNET VIDEO in the title of the post. None of the regular encoders will capture this type of video off of the web. *sheesh*

CLIFF'S NOTES version: 1. Buy $90 worth of software only to find out later that it could be done easier using free software. Dale, no you don't need to buy any software to put video on an iPod. iTunes handles that. But the video must be encoded in either MPEG4 or H.264 at appropriate bit-rates and resolutions. Encoding is what the article is suggesting you waste your money on when there are free solutions.

er, ummm, do you mean to tell me you have to buy a third party app to put video on the new iPod??? Its just another file type! Can't you just drag and drop??? I would be PISSED if I bought/had an OSX machine and a new iPod and could'nt just plug in, drag, drop and view...or is this "story" a sales pitch for a new app..Sat Morning Ramble Dale Boston, MA

use iSquint, that's a lot easier! It's also open source. http://homepage.mac.com/tylerl82/

Another option is to use VLC, you can dump many streaming protocols to your disk. I used it to download System of a Down's video from their site, it was already MP4, so I didn't have to convert it and it runs great on my iPod.

Ha ha - I've been doing this for weeks with whatever video files I want.