Filed under: iPod Family, Video, Hacks, UNIX / BSD, Podcasts
TUAW Reader Video: Video on iPod nano
Our readers are great. flowolf, for example, sent us this great video of him successfully playing an AVI of an episode of the Simpsons on his iPod nano rocking iPodLinux.The video should be enclosed with this post and available via our podcast [direct iTMS link], which is also available via this feed (right click, copy and paste in your podcasting app of choice).
As soon as we get it wrapped up properly, I'll add a link to the torrent file via which you can grab a copy of the video that is playable on your 5G iPods (although needing to be re-encoded to AVI for viewing on any iPods running iPodLinux).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian said 8:47PM on 11-24-2005
Wait.. so you can run the normal ipod firm ware and ipod linux, buy just rebooting it each time?
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Sidney said 9:32PM on 11-24-2005
@Brian: Yep.
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Ryan said 12:30PM on 11-25-2005
what haven't they been able to just flash the video firmware to the nano and watch or instead of using linux build a video player into the ipod nano's firmware?!
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ryan said 11:20PM on 11-24-2005
For those interested in putting ipod linux on your nano. http://opax.swin.edu.au/~reino/nanolinux.htm (step by step instructions) If you try to convert video using your mac it won't work. see video converstion topics on ipodlinux.com I was also able to encode my video through virtual pc and it worked fine, but not natively on my mac,, well tech. you can, but not without compiling some software from source or finding some other software not listed on the ipodlinux site. anyway, just remember, you can only play uncompressed video, so files get pretty big in a hurry. Some people were reporting that you had to split the videos up if they went over 15 minutes or something. I didn't have that problem with any of my videos on the nano and they were over 25 minutes.
My simpsons file was ~1gb, 15fps on the nano. it plays just fine and really looks great, i was considering bumping up the framrate a bit to see if it can play a higher frame rate. The flash memory really makes a difference as far as battery life goes for playing video (vs. hard drive models).
oh, and at the link above u can choose to either boot into ipodlinux or apple firmware by default. as mentioned above, yes, it is a dual boot setup. I chose apple firmware as my default as there are still a few issues with ipod linux and with it being unsupported on the nano, so use at your own risk. The only significant problems i've found is, u can't go to deep sleep without rebooting into apple firmware first. and if u listen to audio and than you attempt to play a video, you get a audio buffer error or something, Resetting the ipod fixes it (middle and play button held down for a few seconds). To choose to boot into linux you just need to hold the rewind button down when the ipod boots.
-ryan
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ryan said 11:39PM on 11-24-2005
oops, I meant middle select button and menu button depressed for the reset.
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Matt said 12:03AM on 11-25-2005
That's pretty damn cool. I'm getting an iPod video, though. The iTunes integration and bigger screen are just ideal. Plus I wouldn't want to void a new nano's warranty.
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Chris Silich said 12:27AM on 11-25-2005
"Plus I wouldn't want to void a new nano's warranty."
What apple don't know can't hurt them... if you wipe it with the updater (or another utility then the updater if necessary) the apple cant tell.
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Jim Gardner said 1:56AM on 11-25-2005
DOOOOD! The walk through I saw, which involves using mencoder from the terminal to transcode the raw avi, produces bad colour output - a big endien problem with the PPC version of mencoder. How did you encode the clip on a Mac and not produce the same results? What did you use to transcode? What settings?
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ryan said 10:03AM on 11-25-2005
Jim, I mentioned above there is a problem encoding video with mencoder on the mac see http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player for details. the forums might have more information or a way to do it on the mac which would be nice, Itried several apps to encode the video but just ended up encoding it using mencoder in virtual pc (win 2000) which worked fine. Compiling mencoder from source might fix it but I didn't attempt to do that yet.
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ram said 11:48PM on 12-06-2005
hey i guys i needa bit of help.. i bought my nano a week b fore the launch of iopd videa and so was dperessed but looks like i can as well .. gr8 but i am still not convinced that ill not loose my warranty if i instal linux on my nano.. another how good is the bit rate in the videos being played by the ipod as in would i stil get to play videos as sharply as they are in my pc ? and from what i read i believe if at all my nano plays video they gotto be under avi format is that ture ?
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