Playing movies and TV shows
Playing YouTube videos
Playing podcasts and audio books
The iPod touch is a terrific video player, with crisp, clear picture quality. Video appears horizontally on the screen (in what's known as landscape mode), and if you rotate the iPod touch 180 degrees to the opposite horizontal position, the video adjusts accordingly. All the controls you expect in a DVD player are right on the screen at the touch of a finger.
You can also play audio books and podcasts on this multimedia machine. The iTunes Store offers an amazing selection of TV shows, movies, audio books, and podcasts. (See Chapter 4.) This chapter shows you how to control video playback, skip forward or backward, and scale the picture to fit your screen. It also shows you how to watch videos on YouTube, the free video-sharing Web site started in 2005 that has since exploded with video clips from all corners of the globe.
Movies, TV shows, and music videos are easy to locate and play. Videos you purchase from the iTunes Store are ready to use, but videos you bring in from other sources may have to be converted first by iTunes to for use on your iPod touch. You can tell if a video needs to be converted by selecting the video in iTunes and checking the Advanced menu: The Create iPod or iPhone version option is grayed out. To convert a video, select the video and choose Advanced
Note
To find out more about why videos need to be converted and how to prepare your own videos and convert imported videos for use with an iPod touch, visit the Tony's Tips section of my Web site (www.tonybove.com/tonytips).
To locate and play a video on your iPod touch, follow these steps:
Tap the screen to show video controls (as shown in Figure 8-1). You can tap again to hide them.
Tap the Play/Pause button while a video is playing to pause the playback. To raise or lower the volume, drag the volume slider. (See Figure 8-1.)
You can fast-forward through a video by touching and holding down the Next/Fast-Forward button, and you can rewind a video by touching and holding down the Previous/Rewind button.
To skip to any point in a video, drag the playhead along the scrubber bar. To start a video over from the beginning, drag the playhead on the scrubber bar all the way to the left or tap the Previous/Rewind button (if the video doesn't contain chapters).
Tip
If the video does contain chapters, you can skip to the previous or next chapter by tapping the Previous/Rewind or Next/Fast-Forward button. To start playing at a specific chapter, tap the bullet-list button that appears in the top-right corner — but remember, this trick works only if the original video was set up to contain chapters.
To stop watching a video before it finishes playing, tap the Done button in the upper-left corner of the display or press the Home button on the device.
If a video offers an alternative audio language or subtitles, a Subtitles button appears. Tap the Subtitles button and then choose a language from the Audio list, or a language from the Subtitles list, or tap On to turn off subtitles.
Videos are automatically set to remember the playback position when you pause. This feature lets you pause a video or TV episode in iTunes while you synchronize your iPod touch. After syncing, you can continue playing the video or episode on your iPod touch from where you paused. This feature also works the opposite way: If you start playing a video on your iPod touch and then pause, and then you sync it with iTunes, the video retains the playback position so that you can continue playing it in iTunes from where you paused.
Tip
You can delete a video directly from your iPod touch by flicking left or right across the video selection in the Videos menu and then tapping the Delete button that appears. Your video is still in iTunes but is deleted from the iPod touch — you can sync the iPod touch again and copy the video back to it (as I explain in Chapter 5). If you delete a rented movie from the iPod touch, it's deleted permanently.
Videos are displayed in landscape mode in widescreen format. You can also scale the video picture to fill the screen or to fit within the screen. Tap the Scale button (the one with two arrows facing away from each other — refer to Figure 8-1) or double-tap the video picture itself to switch from one to the other.
Filling the screen may crop the sides, top, and bottom to give you a larger view of the center of the picture. Fitting to the screen assures that the entire picture is shown, but you may see black bars on the sides or top and bottom.
The newest and most popular videos in YouTube are right in your hand. All you need to do is connect by Wi-Fi. (See Chapter 4 to set up Wi-Fi.) You can search for and play videos, bookmark favorites for later playback, and share videos with others by e-mail.
Tap YouTube on the Home screen to run the YouTube app. If this is your first visit to the YouTube app, the Featured screen appears, as shown in Figure 8-2. Otherwise, the screen you were viewing when you last used the app appears.
You can tap icons along the bottom of the display to get to other screens, such as Most Viewed, as shown in Figure 8-3, which offers buttons at the top for today's most-viewed videos, the faves for this week, and all of the most-viewed videos.
After you've saved your favorites as bookmarks (see the "Bookmarking and sharing" section later in this chapter), you can go right to your favorite videos by tapping the Favorites icon. Tap the More icon to see even more screens, including Top Rated (the best of the best), Most Recent (the most recent videos added), and History (all the videos you've played so far). You can also tap the Sign In button to sign into your YouTube account and access the My Videos section of your account.
Tip
The History screen offers a Clear button so that you can clear your history at any time.
Tap a selection to play the video. YouTube streams the video to your iPod touch — sending it bit by bit — so that you can start playing it immediately.
Tap the video picture to see the controls (see Figure 8-4), which are exactly like the video controls described in the previous section. The progress of the downloaded stream appears in the scrubber bar. Even though you can play the video as it streams, you might want to pause it for a few seconds so that more of the stream is downloaded. You can then play the video without any hiccups.
YouTube offers a couple of handy buttons on its videos (see Figure 8-4 for both buttons):
Bookmark button (a book icon): This button appears to the left of the Previous/Rewind button, and you can use it to bookmark the video so that you can easily find it on the Favorites screen.
Share button (an envelope icon): This button is located to the right of the Next/Fast-Forward button. Tap it to bring up the e-mail sending screen to share the video with others via e-mail — see Chapter 11 for details on how to fill out the e-mail message.
Tap the Bookmark button to save a bookmark for the video — the video selection appears in the Favorites screen, which you can access later by tapping the Favorites icon in the bottom row. (The Bookmark button is gray rather than white if the video is already bookmarked.)
You can also bookmark or share the video without playing it, and you can even view information about the video as well as related video selections. Tap the right-arrow button on the right side of each selection (refer to Figure 8-3) to see information about the video and to use the Bookmark or Share buttons.
To delete entries from your Favorites screen, tap the Favorites icon at the bottom of the display to show your bookmarked favorites, then tap the Edit button in the top-right corner of the screen. The Favorites screen changes to include circled minus (–) signs next to the video selections. To delete a bookmarked video selection, tap the circled minus sign, which then rotates and displays a Delete button over the selection — tap the Delete button. To cancel deletion, tap the rotated circled minus sign again. Tap the Done button in the top-right corner of the Favorites screen to finish editing.
To search for videos on YouTube, tap the Search icon in the bottom row of icons. Then tap the Search Entry field that appears at the top of the screen. The onscreen keyboard pops up, ready for your search term. (For instructions on using the onscreen keyboard, see Chapter 2.)
If the entry field already has a search term, tap the circled x in the right corner of the field to clear its contents. Then tap out the letters of the search term using the onscreen keyboard and tap the Search key on the keyboard. Immediately after tapping Search, video selections from YouTube appear below, as shown in Figure 8-5 (in which I type just u2 to get the latest U2 music videos).
You can scroll this list by dragging up and down. If a video selection appears that satisfies your search, tap it to play it without further ado.
All you have to do is stream
If you're a stream lover (like I am), YouTube isn't nearly enough. You can find streaming Web radio stations and video streams on the Web using apps such as Pandora (radio stations), CBS Sports (live games), and Truveo (TV stations). Your iPod touch needs to be connected to Wi-Fi and the Internet to stream video — see Chapter 4 to get set up.
Pandora lets you type the name of an artist, song, or composer, and Pandora creates a custom station that streams to your iPod touch the music you chose — and more music like it. You can touch the thumbs-up or -down buttons to let Pandora know your musical tastes.
CBS Sports NCAA March Madness on Demand streams live video of every game from the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.
And with Truveo, it's easy to search for streaming video across sites that include NBC, CNN, The Disney Channel, HBO, Discovery Channel, Comedy Central, PBS, MTV, The Wall Street Journal, YouTube, and Dailymotion, and browse featured videos, top searches, channels, or categories. My favorite feature of Truveo is that it lets me look up the most Twittered videos of the day.
Audio books are, naturally, organized into chapters or parts. Podcasts are also organized into parts, called episodes, and both play the same way. The audio book title or podcast name and episode appear on your iPod touch display along with its cover — similar to a book or album cover.
After syncing your audio books and podcast episodes along with the rest of your content (as I describe in glorious detail in Chapter 5), you can find them in the Music screen: Tap the Music icon on the Home screen and then tap the More icon at the bottom-right corner of the Music screen to see the More screen.
Tap Audiobooks on the More screen and then scroll the Audiobooks screen to select and play an audio book. Tap an audio book on the Audiobooks screen that appears and then tap a chapter or part to play it, starting from that point. The audio book chapters or parts are listed in proper order for each book.
Tap Podcasts on the More screen and then scroll the Podcasts screen to select and play a podcast episode. Podcasts are organized by podcast name (which is like an album name), and episodes are listed within each podcast in the order that they were released (by date). A blue dot appears next to any podcast that has unplayed episodes.
You control the playback of an audio book or podcast episode exactly the same way as a song (see Chapter 7) — you can pause playback by tapping the Play/Pause button, and so on. You can control video podcasts the same way you control videos. (See the section "Everything's Coming Up Videos" in this chapter.)
Audio books and podcasts are automatically set to remember the playback position when you pause. If you pause playback on your iPod touch and then sync with iTunes, you can resume playback at that position on either the iPod touch or in iTunes.