Playing iPod Videos an TV

June 17, 2009 8:34 AM

How do I play videos from my iPod Nano on my Phillips television? My Phillips is a flat screen and has a USB port on the side, which my iPod can dock to. When I connect them, the television even recognizes that an iPod is connected, but doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Any ideas?
posted by gm2007 to Technology (3 answers total)

From some quick Googling, it looks like the USB port on your TV is designed to have a USB thumb drive plugged into it, from which the TV can read music and photo files. There's no mention of it being able to play video files read from the USB device, and even if it were able to, the iPod storage hides these files away so that they're not easily accessible.

It is possible to play videos from your nano on your TV, just not via the USB port. Apple makes a number of AV cables for the iPod nano, which plug into the TV's standard AV inputs. Here is a support article that list the cables available, and which are compatible with your iPod nano.
posted by chrismear at 8:51 AM on June 17, 2009

chrismear is right. However, what you could do is tick the 'use the iPod as storage' in iTunes and copy videos you want into that space. Once you do that, the TV set will see those files. The trouble is your TV set probably can't play the mp4 files that were optimized for the iPod, and the iPod may not be able to play AVI or MPEG files that the TV can play. So you'd have to keep two versions of video on your iPod and you'd manually need to move the files to partition that the TV can read. It would probably be much easier to either get the cables chrismear talks about or just buy a USB thumbdrive and use that to hold the videos you want to watch on TV.
posted by birdherder at 9:44 AM on June 17, 2009

Here is the exact item you'll need from the Apple store.

Your video will have to be in MP4 or H.264 format, exactly as 'apple' dictates for the nano - but yes, depending on your model (mentioned in the apple store item), it will play video.

It won't be usb, but rather, a component cable, like plugging in a DVD player.
posted by filmgeek at 6:28 AM on June 18, 2009