I have the new Nano and have not been able to get a video on it. I was able to move a small .avi file into iTunes but it wouldn’t let me put it on the Nano. I have an 11G mpeg file that iTunes would not allow me to even move into the library.
What file types are acceptable to iTunes, and are there any size limitations? Same question for the Nano.
The only thing I found on this was an archived page on Apple’s site that applied to old versions.
This is the most disappointing thing about the ipods. MP4 and MOV are the main ones. They won’t play anything Microsoft (AVI, WMV) and I don’t think they play MPEG or DIVX movies either.
Basically you can play what you get from the store!
You can ‘jailbreak’ an ipod touch or an iphone so that it isn’t ‘jailed’ to itunes. But I’m not sure if you can do that with the nano. And I don’t like the idea of doing it anyway - being as it’s illegal and all.
Ideally, you want MPEG 4 files encoded with the H.264 codec; that’s pretty much the standard video format the world over now (except the web, where it’s probably flash .flv). .AVI and .WMV are pretty much windows-only formats, although you can find software to read them. There should be no size limitations; 11G isn’t even all that big for a video file. Audio should be AAC, AIFF, or MP3, but AIFF is pretty big and therefore a bad choice.
H.264 video and AAC/MP3 audio can be created by almost any tool, and will work on almost any platform, so it should usually be your target of choice, all other things being equal.
However, iTunes is pretty good (by way of QuickTime) about converting them for you, assuming you can get them in the library. **Just right-click on the video in the library and select “Create iPod or iPhone version” ** and give it a (long) while. If you can’t even get it into the library, then it’s encoded with a codec that QuickTime/iTunes either can’t use, or isn’t installed on your system.
What people tend to forget is that most of the formats like AVI, MPEG, and Quicktime are “container formats” – they’re not actually a “file format” so much as a box that you can put lots of different formats in. This, saying you have an “mpeg” file doesn’t really tell you anything. The real “format” is the compressor/decompressor (codec), and there are far too many of those in use, especially in Windows. But you can use tools like Handbrake (free, both platforms) to convert between many common ones.
Which reminds me. I wonder if I’ll be able to play my huge collection of Avis and mpegs on my htc hero (when I get it)