I think I may have been the last one in the world to get an Ipod because about a month ago I broke down and got a 30gb Video Ipod. By now, there are thousands of hacks and tricks to pimp out your Ipod and I am just discovering some of them. My latest conquest is adding youtube videos to my ipod. There are probably about a dozen videos that I can watch at any given time and enjoy them no matter if its the 2nd or 10,00th time I’ve seen them, so by keeping them on my Ipod i have them whenever I’m in the mood. It always seems like at some point in time a conversation will erupt among friends that includes “have you seen this video?” and inevitably someone still hasn’t seen the ‘Evolution of Dance‘ video (the most popular of all time on Youtube) and instead of having to remember to email someone a link, I can just whip out the ipod and show’em.

Adding Youtube (or any other video) to your ipod is really easy.

1. Using FireFox Browser, install the Video Downloader extension from here.

2. Restart your browser and you should see a little icon in the bottom of your status bar like the following image.

3. Navigate to a video page such as this puppy vs cat video http://youtube.com/watch?v=7bcV-TL9mho

4. Click on the above Video Downloader icon in your browser. A new window will spawn and in most cases you can just click on the ‘Download Video’ button.

5. The video will download and probably have a file name of ‘get_video’ or ‘7bcV-TL9mho’. Rename the video (right click > rename) and label your video. Be sure to add ‘.f’lv’ to the file name. My Puppy vs Cat example would end up looking like puppy-vs-cat.flv

6. Converting to Ipod format - MoviePod is an application that works on both Mac and PC. It supports every common movie format including: MOV, MPG, AVI, ASF, WMV, VOB, and DV. Nullriver, the makers of MoviePod, don’t specifically list FLV as a compatible file type, but MoviePod will successfully convert it to an iPod mpeg-4 video. MoviePod does a lot more than just convert Flash video files and only costs $10 (Mac/PC), if you don’t know how to obtain it otherwise ;). There are some free options such as Media Convert http://www.media-convert.com/.

7. Add the file to MoviePod and it will convert it for you, and if you have Itunes open it will add it to your library for you.

8. Add to Ipod and enjoy.

Questions?