OK, disclaimer here, I'm not suggesting anyone use the tools mentioned in this post to break any laws. As many of you know, Apple unveiled a new iPod yesterday that can play video. Apparently all the cool (rich) kids will have one. Unfortunately I won't, so I can't test any of this out. If all the cool kids are going to have one, don't you think we should be able to let them watch our library tutorial screencasts on them? Having not seen one, I don't know if the screen size is too small to make this feasible, but I think someone should try!
Here's a link to a tutorial (not a screencast) on How to Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software. This method requires a Mac, and seems to want the source file to be on a DVD, which most of our screencasts aren't. But it does offer some good information on CODECS, resolution, and screen size. I did a quick Google search and found AVS Video Converter, which claims to be able to convert AVI, Real Video, QuickTime, or WMV to MP4, which apparently is what the iPod wants to see. I have no experience with this product (which isn't free), but it would seem to be what we'd need to get our screencast output into the correct format.
Now I know that Camtasia Studio allows alternate output formats when saving a screencast (AVI, WMV, MOV, Real ), and I thought my original fav ViewletBuilder did too, but I can actually only find SWF as the output option for that product :-(, so unless someone knows of an SWF->x converter we may be out of luck making Viewlets available on the iPod. Hmm, Captivate only allows output as SWF too. 'kay, Google to the rescue again with the following possible SWF -> AVI converters: WinMPG Video Convert and ADSharit (again I have no experience with these).
OK, so to recap, we need someone with 1) a new video iPod, 2) Camtasia Studio, and 3) AVS Video Converter or similar. If someone can provide me with item #1 I'll be pleased to take the experiment from there ;-) But seriously, we need to give this a try - who's going to volunteer?
Update: There's a page on the Apple site that shows how to create video for the iPod using QuickTime 7 Pro.
