Jul 16, '07 07:30:04AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
One major oversight is the lack of video playlists. On an iPod with video, you can create a playlist to hold recent podcasts, and it will contain both audio and video podcasts you have downloaded. They will all sync to the iPod just fine, and if you go in to Music » Playlists to access those playlists, the iPod will play the audio of all files inside. Allowing "video" files to show up in the audio-only playlist may be a bug, but this "feature" allows you to listen to audio of videos you have without needing to power up the screen (for when you might want to just listen to a vidcast or TV show audio). The bonus is that you can also go in to Videos » Playlist, and then the list will play audio files, but switch on the video when it his a video file.
That might be a useful tip on its own, but on the iPhone, this does not work. On the iPhone, you get a Playlists section, but it contains only audio files. Thus, if you have a playlist called Recent Podcasts that contains both audio and video files on iTunes, it syncs fine and works on an iPod with video, but it will only sync the audio files on an iPhone. (This may be a bug fix or feature removal, depending on how you see it.)
Even if the playlist contained tons of vidcasts, they won't sync to the iPhone automatically. You have to specifically enable those podcasts using the rules of the Podcast tab of iTunes when connected to the iPhone, which is rather limited. (ie, "all unplayed," "recent of specific podcasts," and so on). So if you have the Leo Laporte podcast (which can generate six or more podcasts in a day), using "3 most recent" will miss some of those, and give you extras of monthly/weekly podcasts (which your iPhone may not have room for).
So, for now, there is a simple workaround to get vidcasts in a playlist to appear on the iPhone without messing with the podcast selection.
When syncing to the iPhone, there is a checkbox in the Music tab of iTunes that says "Including music videos." By having that set, the iPhone will also sync files of video type "Music video." They won't show up in the Music playlists, but will appear in their own section inside the Videos section of the iPhone. The workaround is this: Toggle the video type of vidcasts you can sync based on playlist to "Music video." That's all. What I do: I created a smart playlist called Recent Vidcasts, which looks something like this:
- Match (all) of the following rules:
- (Podcast) (is true)
- (Kind) (does not contain) ("audio")
- (Date Added) (is in the last) ("4") (days)
Or, even better, I use a script to do this for me -- it just goes through my Recent Vidcasts and toggles them, then I sync. I will provide the script later (it's based on another tip here and I want to get their permission first). So, your challenge: find me/us a better way!
