The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

Video on iPhone

I've hit on a little TV obsession here in my idle hours between baby feedings. This one is cool because it involves way more than just watching something on the telly. This is unavailable-in-the-US show watching. The kind where you pull torrents of the show down from the net using semi-legit sites, then go about converting them so I can watch them on my Mac and put them into iTunes with the correct MPEG format for watching on my iPhone. Now I can watch these episodes on the go, or rather, seated with my one hand full of baby, the other clutching the Jesus Phone and keeping it away from baby vomit.

The show is The IT Crowd, [Fancast Link] and here is a little snippet on YouTube to give you a taste...

Here is a site with links to the 1st season episodes. I found my shows here.

Converting them to iPhone format-- that was a another little battle in itself. Google should be ashamed of the link-spam mess that they have become, all in the name of profit. If you google iphone video convert you get pages of link-spam and junk sites pushing ads at you. After more careful digging around on some macintosh sites, I found what I was looking for. VisualHub did the converting perfectly, and gave me excelling quality videos on my iPhone. It cost $35, but is well worth the price for converting Windows format movies to the Mac compatible formats, as well as formatting for the screen size of the iPhone and all the iPods capable of playing video. It will even put them into iTunes for you after it has finished converting them.

I recommend VisualHub if you have a Mac and video-capable iPod and want to easily convert over some of the many free shows available on the net.

What will you do with your $100?

I'm planning on getting iLife '08 or an airport express.

Getting the $100 credit is the nice touch by Apple. I was happy paying $599 for my iPhone- the price drop will only mean more iPhones on the street, and more iPhone compatible websites.