If you love short videos you’ll definitely love YouTube. And if you own an iPod, you’ll quickly see that the tubes and the pods are made for one another. The problem is, figuring out how to get YouTube videos on your iPod is easier said than done.

For the start, you can’t just download YouTube videos directly from the site. You’ll need some help to do it. And after you finally get the videos you want, they couldn’t be played on your iPod because of the differences in file format.

So, to be able to get YouTube videos on your iPod, you’ll need to:

1. Find and download the videos that you want.
2. Convert the videos into the format that iPod understands.
3. Import the converted videos into iPod.

There are countless ways to achieve those objective and finally get YouTube videos on your iPod, from the unknown tools and the alternatives to the one click solution. But I’d like to cover a bit different angle here; a thorough method and yet simple and general enough that anybody could use.

1. The Converting

Assuming that every person has his/her personal preferences of videos, I won’t discuss about choosing which videos to download. I also save the downloading for later and will instead start with the video conversion process.

The reason is simple, not everybody has enough horsepower in their machine to make the process less time consuming. And with all the free online and desktop video converters out there, it would be logical to let the expert do the conversion while we can make use our computers to do something else. So, the only thing we need to do is downloading the end result.

The one that I will use here is the good ‘ol Zamzar (which strangely still in beta).

There are four easy steps to follow

1. Insert the YouTube video’s URL, such as “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ9jrBg4Lwc”
2. Choose the format to convert the file to. There’s “iPod” as one of the format choice. But if you are not using Zamzar and there’s no iPod in the option, you would want to choose the format which is playable by iPod like MP4.



3. Enter your email address as Zamzar will send you email with the download link after the conversion process is done.
4. Click “Convert”, then “OK” on the pop-up confirmation window, and you can continue working on whatever you are working while waiting for the email to arrive.

2. The Downloading

There’s nothing much to tell in this part. You get the email and you click the link in it.

You’ll directed to the download page where your already converted YouTube video is waiting. Another click is needed here. Then you wait until the downloading process is finished.

Please note that if you are using the free version of Zamzar, your download link will only valid for 24 hours.

3. The Importing

Now, the for the most fun step: importing.

But first thing first, don’t forget to rename the file to something ‘understandable’ since YouTube files tend to have ‘inhumane’ names.

And to import the video to iPod, you have to import it first to iTunes. All you’ve got to do is right click on the file and choose “Open With” and then “iTunes”. If there’s no iTunes in the list, choose “Other” then pick “iTunes” from the pop-up list of application.

The video will reside in the iTunes folder and the next time you synchronize your iPod and iTunes, the video will automatically copied to iPod’s hard drive and ready to be watched.

If your iPod is not set to import the movies from iTunes, change the preferences by going to the device folder on the left side of iTunes and choose Movies tab. Give check mark to the “Sync movies” option.

One final note, the process I went through here is done using a Mac, but it is more or less the same thing under Windows.

Do you watch YouTube videos on iPod? Do you have other method of getting the tubes to the pod? Share using the comment below.