Just in case you got tired of showing off Desparate Housewives on your new video ipod, you can surf on over to archive.org and download some of their feature films to help fill those gigabytes. Some worthwhile classics: Night of the Living Dead, film noir classic D.O.A. and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Simply download the 256kb MPEG 4 version, sync them to your ipod and voila! Entertainment.

(Oh, these files also play just as well in the Core Pocket Media Player I mentioned in the previous post).

Enjoy.

Update: Further testing reveals that while the videos from archive.org work, the audio is occasionally plagued by intermittent static bursts. Some incompatibility between mpeg audio codecs? More exploration is clearly needed.

Well, my wife and I are coming up on our 11th anniversary of our first date, an important holiday which she leveraged to get me to buy her a new video iPod, which she’s had for a couple of days. Expect a podcast in the next few days (recorded not in my car, but in BrainWagon Studios, aka my dining room, but with decent mics and my mixer setup) to relay her impressions of the little gadget, and the results of our efforts to load various kinds of free video media on it.

In the mean time, not to be left out, I downloaded the Core Pocket Media Player for my Dell Axim x50v, and I must admit, this is one slick program. It allows playing of MPEG-1, MPEG-4, DivX and MJPEG video files on your Pocket PC, along with MP3 audio and Ogg Vorbis files. It’s released under the GPL, and free, so download and enjoy! They apparently even have a version for Smartphones, so I’ll be checking that out before our next podcast.

Update: I tried out the SmartPhone version too. It works well, albeit not as smoothly as the version for the Pocket PC (much lower power computer in the phone). Good stuff!