By popular request: iPod Conversion How-to

There's a couple of new video iPods out there in the wild and not everyone wants to download their videos from the iTunes store. There's a couple of free solutions to the rescue.

For short video clips Videora is a well-regarded free program to translate mpg and avi files to iPod format. Although a legally murkier area, Engadget has a good guide to convert a DVD to iPod format. Both these programs run on Windows-based PCs.

On the Mac side, a couple of free solutions exist (my favorite is iSquint), but the one I actually use is the $23.23 VisualHub, because it converts just about any video format to practically any other format (though not, as of the latest release, the motion jpg format the Nintendo Wii prefers).