BIG HUGE WARNING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ARTICLE:

iPods are expensive. The methods below involve modification of the firmware on the iPod, so you could very well "brick" your iPod. If you are careful and pay attention to the fact that this only works easily on v1-3 iPods and you need to use a different method for v4 and the minis, you should be fine, but you need to be more experienced with this sort of hacking, so be careful. Just don't let the power go out while you try this.

Everyone wants a video iPod because it natively support playing videos on the go...but even with this modern technological marvel there is still some annoying conversion that is necessary to make it play videos without copyright protections and all that nasty stuff.

Luckily for us, there is a way to play video, on non-video iPods, and with some work it is very possible. Keep in mind it will obviously work better on a newer iPod with a color screen, but with this added advantage it is necessary to go through some extra work to get iPod Linux installed correctly. You can find this guide later in the article.

In order to accomplish this, we will use a program called iPod Linux, which can be downloaded from here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ipodlinuxinst/ipodlinux-installer-1.2.1.zip?download

IMPORTANT:

This method only works on iPods version 1-3, but for the fourth generation and the minis you need some extra steps. They can be found here: http://ipodlinux.org/4G_Installer You NEED to be a little experienced for this process, it is not very newbie friendly.

Before you execute the installer, turn your iPod on and make sure it says "Do not disconnect", which is also known as disk mode.

Run the installer, and you should choose the original Apple firmware to boot by default. This means that when you turn your iPod on, it will look normal, but when you hold the rewind button while the iPod is booting, you will be able to boot into the iPod Linux operating system for the iPod, which will give you video playback capabilities.

Continue to install the software to the iPod by following the installer.

Once successfully installed on either your V1-3 or v4 iPod or mini, you can now use a program called MoPiD to convert and transfer video to your iPod. http://joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/sp/win/mopid/index.html

Now all it takes is an input video file, a transcode and a transfer of the converted video to your iPod, and you can watch video in grayscale. If you have a v4, you can watch in color, which is well worth the extra work r acquired to get Linux on those 'pods.

CREDIT:

• The iPod Linux project, for making the operating system bootable on the iPod
• Author of MoPiD, for making video convertable for the iPod
• All the contributers to the iPod Linux wiki, and the writers of the tutorial to install the system