**Please read end for problem resolution***
I'll admit, I'm lazy, but technology fascinates me to no end. I'll get to the lazy part in a bit, but I simply have to know how everything works, and when I do, I then need a new challenge. I know more than 99% of the human populous about PC's, XP, Vista and, well... even 2000, 3.0, 3.1x and even DOS. Now my latest quest as of this year is all things Apple.
Six months ago, I didn't so much as own an iPod. Yes, I had MP3 players, but just not an Apple product. Today, nearing the end of 2008, I own (in this order) an Ipod Nano, 24" iMac, MacBook, (had an iPhone for 10 days but sent it back because ATT's calls had more drops than Murine and Visine put together) and now my latest acquisition is the iPod Touch. Regessing a moment, if T-Mobile had iPhones, I'd be on that faster than Jerry Yang would say YES to another Microsoft offer.
Getting back to my iPod Touch, I'll tell you why I posted this blog, and why that title. I mentioned I have a Nano, and although its only 8gb, it actually does everything I need, only the screen is too small for my taste. Enter Touch. If you are a loyal Apple user, you know all about things working. Even though Apple's OS X is not perfect, the small shortcomings are not near annoying enough to move back to any PC, for me, and likely for most of you. That being said, my iPod Touch should work at least as well as my Nano no? It does what it does pretty well, but what it doesn't do is play my synced video podcasts. I get audio with a frozen screen where video should be. Same sync to Nano yeilds perfect video, albeit tiny in comparison.
Yes, I'm a tech, and yes there is likey a solution, but the "Genius" at the apple store told me to force the settings on all videos in the individual settings so it sees it as a video. Now, lets get this straight: My 8gb $199 Nano knows how to distinguish everything perfectly, but my $499.00 Touch can't figure it out? As I opened this Blog, I've admitted that I'm lazy. Especially when I need to dedicate a fair amount of time getting Album Art for about 10% of my music library which is a complete time bandit if ever there was one.
I have a strange way about me sometimes. If I can't correct this easily, I might just throw in the towel and return the Touch and go back to my trusty, true, and tiny Nano. Surely there are many other ways I can spend $500.00. What can I say? I just want my shit to work!
***Problem Solved***
Well, lets just chalk this up to slightly bad ergonomics of the unit and lack of logical thinking when I needed it. The unit works, and does so very well, but here is where I went wrong, and where Apple can make a bit of an adjustment.
Going into 'Music' on the iPod Touch, there is a section for Podcasts. Although Podcasts are not music, this is the buttons name. I guess Audio is not sexy enough. This Music button is where I kept going into to find my grand list of Podcasts, audio and video. They are all in there. When I select an audio Podcast, it works fine. When I select a video Podcast, I'd get only the audio portion with the begining image of the video frozen on screen. For this reason, I never looked elsewhere to make it work.
The resolution is, in order to see those video Podcasts, you need to go to Video from the main screen. When I did this, I had a list of my downloaded videos, but when I scroll down, beneith the downloaded videos, there is a section called Podcasts. There, again, are the listings of all the Video Podcasts, only now, from this section, they simply work.
Why apple allows these videos to be indexed in the audio section of 'Podcasts' is beyond me. The Touch is a great and powerful unit, but a bit more thought could be put into the clear seperation of video and audio PodCasts. I say, just have a completely seperate Podcast main button, and seperate Audio and Video folders within. Then even a linear thinking logical person such as myself can operate the entire unit without the hand holding of instructions.
Posts
