This How to will show how easy it is to start watching your own movies on your iPod Nano

Requirements:

*An Apple iPod Nano. (3G or Newer)

*An Apple iPod Nano Sync cable. (The cable that came with it)

*A Windows-based PC. (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 (Server), Windows 2005 (MCE), Windows Vista or Windows 7)

*Apple iTunes installed on Windows PC (the latest version is recommended, but as long as it is compatible with your iPod Nano, it will work just fine)

*A DVD drive in Windows-PC. (Needed for DVD conversion) If your computer has more than one DVD drive, we recommend using the DVD burner instead of the DVD-ROM drive. DVD Burners are usually better in reading DVDs, and especially for your first time, it would reduce the chance of any complications that might arise.

*DVD conversion software. (DVD Catalyst 3 is recommended, but DVD Catalyst Free will do as well)

Step 1: Initial Setup.

*Install DVD Catalyst onto your Windows-based computer.  At the end of the install, it has options to open the user guide and to start the program after install. For convenience, uncheck them both.

*The installer puts a shortcut for DVD Catalyst on your desktop. Double-click it to run the program.

*Open your DVD drive tray, and put the DVD you want to watch on your iPod Nano in the drive. Close the drive-tray.

*After a few seconds, DVD Catalyst will recognize that you inserted a DVD, and it will perform a scanning procedure on it. The scanning procedure is performed by DVD Catalyst to gather information about the DVD, which is uses to optimize it during the next step for the best possible quality on your iPod Nano. Depending on the DVD itself, if it is a TV DVD or a Movie DVD, it might take a little while before the scanning is complete.

Step 2: Starting the conversion.

*Using the dropdowns at the left, select Apple > iPod Nano (DVD Catalyst 3) or at the bottom (DVD Catalyst Free), select the iPod Nano profile. If there are more profiles listed (DVD Catalyst 3) ignore them. These other profiles are more specific, and do not serve a purpose or an explanation in this particular “How To” guide.

*Click the Go button to start the conversion. The conversion will take a while, depending on the speed of your computer.

What DVD Catalyst is doing at this point is converting the video from one format to another format. The video on a DVD is created in a specific video format called MPEG2. While there are many devices that can play this particular video format, the iPod Nano cannot play video in this format, so to be able to watch the DVD on your iPod Nano, it has to be converted into a format that will play on it. In addition, DVDs are intended to be viewed on a bigger screen, and to have a good quality on even bigger TV screens, the quality setting used to create the DVD video makes it quite big in file size (4 GB or more). If the video just gets converted to a compatible format, this would mean you can barely fit 2 movies on an 8GB iPod Nano. Because of the smaller screen on the iPod Nano, it does not need to be that big to maintain the same quality, so during conversion, DVD Catalyst changes the format to make it compatible, adjusts the screen size to make it fit properly on the iPod Nano screen, and adjusts the quality itself to reduce the file size. This way, movies that would normally take up more than half of the space on your iPod Nano, you end up with 10 times as many movies and TV shows.

Step 3: Preparing iTunes for transferring video files.

This is where quite a few people experience some complications. iTunes, Apple’s software for transferring music and video files to your iPod Nano, is quite powerful in options; however, if these options are not set a certain way, it actually blocks other options.

*Connect your iPod Nano to your computer with the Sync-cable. iTunes should start automatically after a few seconds. If it does not, double-click on the iTunes icon to start the program.

*On the left side, find your iPod Nano. It should be listed under “DEVICES”. Click on your iPod Nano’s name in iTunes, and on the left side it will show some information about it, a few buttons for update and restore, and below that a couple of checkmarks. While iTunes has numerous options to automatically transfer videos and songs, the easiest to transfer videos to your iPod Nano is by enabling the checkmark for “Manually manage music and videos”. If you do not have this selected, it is hard to manually select the movies you want to transfer.

*Once you have enabled the “Manually manage” checkmark, click on Apply to have it set.

Step 4: Transferring the movie to your iPod Nano.

When the conversion is finished, DVD Catalyst automatically opens the folder where it stores the video files. By default, the files are stored in your “My Video” (for windows 2000/XP/2003) or “Videos” (Vista/Windows 7), so if you closed the dialog, you can find it again by opening on “My Computer” and browsing to your “My Documents” folder or your “user” folder.

There are a few different ways of transferring the files to your iPod Nano. If you are like us, and have a big collection build-up with movies and TV shows, it might not be desirable to have them all in iTunes. Rather than having 1000’s of files in iTunes, which makes it a bit slow, we prefer to bypass the iTunes library feature, and just transfer the files we want directly to the iPod Nano.

Method 1 (preferred), bypassing the iTunes library.

*In iTunes, click on your iPod Nano on the left, so that right underneath it, it will show Movies, Music (and your playlists if you have any on there) Click once on the movies so it shows the movies that are already on your iPod Nano (if any) on the left side. Now go to the Windows Explorer dialog that shows the video file(s) created by DVD Catalyst. Left-click and hold the file, and drag it over to the video selection of your iPod Nano. The mouse arrow should show a green “+” icon after a few seconds. Once this happens, left go of the mouse button, and iTunes will transfer the file.

If you already use iTunes for your music collection, you might want to have it manage your video collection as well. If this is the case, just add the video file to the library.

Method 2: Add to the iTunes library, and then transfer from library to your iPod Nano

To add files to the iTunes library, just drag the video files to it in the same way as mentioned in method one, however, instead of selecting the “Movies” item underneath your iPod Nano, select the “Movies” item underneath the library. You can also use the “File > Add file to library” or “File > Add folder to library” in the iTunes top menu as well. Once you have your movies in the iTunes library, transfer of the movies to your iPod Nano works the same as for music.