On a Lighter note: mcleavidipod:

I just got a Refurbed 60GB iPod Video through Apple (it was in the area on Monday, but trying to actually get the device was like a 3 day experience). I had such good luck with my wife's refurbed iPod Mini (I bought it because they no longer made the model she wanted), that I didn't even think twice about buying a refurb unit. Well, I thought about it twice because it's still quite a bit of money for one of these things, but still cheaper than a lot of things (like a furnace, or even a new iPod video 30GB).

My first thought on seeing this was whoooo boy, that thing's thick. It's about as thick as my 3rd generation iPod, and that's only 20GBs. It weighs about the same as well. I thought, for some reason, that the 60s would be just as thin as the 30s, but it seems like pretty much the same shape and size as the 20GB iPod I have (which I'm never getting rid of). Not that the size is a bad thing. I plugged it in (don't like the USB, would rather have Firewire), and instantly restored and reformatted the iPod with the latest firmware. That process took about 8 minutes. Then I loaded 27.7GBs of my music on there (which is almost every CD I own), and it took about an hour and a half. Kind of slow, but eh... what do I expect, right?

I mainly got this iPod for the size of the hard drive, the gapless playback feature, and with the notion that maybe the video stuff might come in handy in certain situations. I'm still on the fence about watching pocket sized video in your hand (it can literally be quite the pain in the neck), though I'm going to test that out a little more with some Chad Vader episodes I downloaded from Google. That guy's hilarious. Maybe hooking it up to a TV would make me understand the video portions more.

I got a case for it (which I'm returning) and a vent mount for the car. For some reason I thought getting a vent mount would make using the iPod in the car a bit safer. Hmmm, I don't see that happening. Nope, I think it's still going to be to set the iPod before you get going on the road, as the navigation on it certainly isn't very easy to do while doing something else (for instance, walking). I think a perfect solution would be a voice activated navigation system for it, though I'm sure there are so many tech hurdles to jump that it's just not feasible to do.

So far, gapless playback rocks, the QuickScroll feature is difficult to use (in that it doesn't seem to kick in very easily), and converted YouTube videos look like, well, YouTube videos. I thought squishing those videos down with a different codec would help the visuals a bit, but it still looks about the same. Usable, but still way too lossy for my taste. Just the nature of the codec they use in conjunction with Flash Video Files I guess. Too bad they don't use the H264 codec because that codec is awesome.