by Neil Wallace
If you're like most people who own one of Apple's beautiful iPods, you're probably in love with it. But you also want to be sure you get the most out of your investment and enjoy every one of its incredible features. And that includes the ability to watch all your favorite movies.
The movies were my textbooks for everything else in the world. When it wasn’t, I altered it. If I saw a college, I would see only cheerleaders or blonds. If I saw New York City, I would want to go to the slums I’d seen in the movies, where the tough kids played. If I went to Chicago, I’d want to see the brawling factories and the gangsters.
—Jill Robinson (b. 1936)
Apple's latest iPods are built primarily for playing music, but don't forget they come fully equipped with superb multimedia features. So if you thought they were just for listening to music, think again. You can also view photo albums, play games, and watch movies, and more. And the performance is superb due to advanced technology that uses Mp4 encoding.
Mp4, also known as MPEG-4, is the global multimedia standard defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group that delivers professional-quality audio and video streams over a wide range of bandwidths. Mp4 enables DVD-quality video to be delivered at lower data rates and smaller file sizes, and that's very important on smaller devices with limited storage capacity.
In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman’s daily life. World War I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser. It’s about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex. The Depression is not about an economic collapse. It’s about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out into the streets. Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children. Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman’s life: men, marriage, motherhood, and all the usual “feminine” things. At the same time that big events are made small, personal, small events are made huge.... Thus, the woman’s film is a genre that generously empowers a sex that society has relegated to secondary status.
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
Your iPod is already able to play Mp4 files. Transferring movie files to your iPod is easy. First, download the files you want from the Internet to your PC. Second, ensure they are in mp4 format. If you need to convert them you can use software such as Aom MP4 Converter. Third, add the mp4 files into your iTunes library. iTunes is the software that is provided with your iPod. Finally, connect your iPod to your PC and follow the onscreen instructions to transfer the files.
This is a beautiful device and it would be a shame to use it only for one purpose and to miss out on all its other uses. So I guess now you'll be watching movies, listening to music and playing games, all day long. Who's going to get any work done? Well, not me, I'm kind of busy right now. Neil Wallace is an avid multimedia enthusiast and the editor of Mp4 Magazine. For movies, music and multimedia reources, visit http://www. Mp4Magazine.com