3.5.08

Adding video files to your iPod video in Ubuntu

My brother got a new iPod Classic 80G(black) for his birthday.
He's been using Ubuntu for a little less than a year now and wanted to load some videos into his iPod.
Needless to say: Using an XP/Vista/OSX machine with iTunes installed was not an valid option for us. So we sat down and googled for solutions.
I'm Just documenting this for future use:

We followed the instructions in Ubuntu's iPod Video Encoding page.
I chose the easy way - using Mark Pilgrim's script which works great and it converted any format I had so far to iPod's M4A format.

Adding files using GTKPod "Add Files" button will load the resulting file into the iPod but I couldn't find a way to delete files. Deleting the video files seems to be possible only using Rhythmbox.
(I Should report a feature request for deleting video files in GTKPod)

To make life even more ridiculously easy I added a menu entry for it by adding 'nautilus-actions' package:
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions
Then go to System->Preferences->Nautilus Action Configuration , add new item with the following details:
Label: Convert to iPod format
Path: /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
Parameters: -x /usr/local/bin/podencoder -o %d %M
Filenames: *.avi ; *.mpeg ; *.mpg ; *.gp3
Mimetypes: video/*

Works!
:)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is awesome it works! I didn't realize I had to go download another script right away though, I added the action before....

Then I decided to read the ENTIRE post..heh

Anonymous said...

Nautilus actions opens and closes. Where do i add a new item?