OK...so, how to I move movies to this iPod while on the road?

[volcs0]

Sorry to ask this newbie question...

Am on vacation with my family, and my son wants me to move a compressed video from my laptop to his iPod touch. The iPod is associated with our mac at home. But I can't seem to drag anything to the iPod - music or videos. I don't want to get anything off of it - just add to it. I don't have any of the sync options checked on the iPod.

What am I missing? WIth my phone (android), I just drag and drop to and from the phone.

Do I need to get one of those transfer applications for the iPod touch?

Thanks for the help...

[deckeda]

His iPod is associated with a different iTunes library. Senuti or another app might work.

[volcs0]

I tried a few things - nothing worked. Most things I found were for getting stuff off of the iPod.

One option would be to jailbreak the device and then get the VLC app from Cydia, but I don't want to JB his iPod.

I got this program called PhotoSync. This is letting me put videos onto the iPod, though I need to play them from the Photos application.

This is all pretty draconian....and frustrating.

[bazookaman]

Senuti and Podworks will take stuff OFF your ipod. Never tried putting it back though.

[kj4btkljv]

Because it's associated with his computer, and not your computer, you would have to erase all the content from his iPod just to get that 1 movie over to watch.

It's a pain, but I'm pretty sure that was the deal that was struck with the music labels, film studios and Apple. Keeps Apple squeaky clean when it comes to the whole "stealing movies and music" thing.

You could do this in the meantime - download the AirVideo app. There's a free version, for evaluation and testing. You'll need the companion app on your computer. What this does is it lets your computer act as a video server, and the app on the iPod/iPhone streams it from the computer to the iDevice. It's really slick, actually.

http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html

Jeff

[onthedownlow]

You can just temporarily choose to 'manually manage' the iPod and then you'll be able to drag whatever content you want to the iPod...create Playlists, delete them...anything.

The iPod will stay in this manual mode until you uncheck it not to be, at that point it will sync with the iTunes Library on the computer it is hooked up to (it will give you another warning, just to make sure you want to do that).

So he just has to take it back (later) to his computer and then turn off the manual mode; however, it will re-sync to his Library and the items/changes you copied onto it will be removed.

[onthedownlow]

...also, if he wants to keep the movies, when he gets it iPod back to his computer, before he removes the manual management, he can then use a transfer utility to copy the movies off the iPod to his computer, resync his iPod (temporarily losing the movies), but then copy the movies back to this iPod through his own Library.

Hope that make sense.

[volcs0]

onthedownlow wrote:
You can just temporarily choose to 'manually manage' the iPod and then you'll be able to drag whatever content you want to the iPod...create Playlists, delete them...anything.

The iPod will stay in this manual mode until you uncheck it not to be, at that point it will sync with the iTunes Library on the computer it is hooked up to (it will give you another warning, just to make sure you want to do that).

So he just has to take it back (later) to his computer and then turn off the manual mode; however, it will re-sync to his Library and the items/changes you copied onto it will be removed.

That worked. Thanks.

I took a bunch of videos with our HD video camera yesterday and compressed them with VisualHub. The whole process went pretty smoothly until I tried to move them to his touch. But I didn't know about that manually manage option. Thanks.

I have used Air Video in the past for my iPad - I have not tried it on the iPod touch. Thanks for the tip.