How to watch chess videos on your iPod or iPhone

There are a lot of chess videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites, and just not enough time to watch them all! I have my own little channel with 20 or so clips, but there are obviously a lot of other players who upload chess videos with analysis, tournament reports, and tutorials. Being able to take all that free content as it gets uploaded to “the internets” and watch it away from the computer would be very handy. Youtube is great in that it has the dominant amount of content, but it has a couple of limitations in 10 minutes being maximum length of most clips, and in that it does not provide any built-in ability to subscribe and automatically download videos to your computer. Blip.TV does not have these limitations, and it has a couple of great chess channels to which you can subscribe and continuously get new videos to your media device. Just follow these steps:

1. Install ITunes
2. Subscribing. Go to a ChessVibes or Chess.FM channel on blip.tv, I found these two to be providing great content. Please let me know if you know of others. Click on “Subscribe to this show on ITunes”:
   
   This should launch iTunes, if it is not running yet, and the channel will now show up in your list of podcasts:
   
3. Conversion. After iTunes downloads the latest videos for these channels, select a bunch of clips, right click and do “Create iPod or iPhone Version”. Conversion takes a while, but you don’t have to sit there all day watching the bytes flip. Hey, at least you don’t need to download any fishy shareware conversion tools that stop working after two weeks (but probably keep spying on your PC). You just have to trust Apple, but you already have bought an iPod, so …
   
4. Uploading to the device. Once clips have been converted, they should show up under Movies in your iTunes. If you have set up your device to let you manage uploads manually, you should be able to drag and drop those babies to the device:

 
After the copying is done, they videos should show up when you go to videos section on the phone/device.

That’s it! I found iPodTouch screen to be large enough to watch a chess game analysis, so having this process in place was a big win. It’s all done with a click or drag and drop; so simple that my Grandmother should be able to do it too. But wait, my Grandmother knows how to repair a PC better than I do. Bad example…