$295 is planned price.
Drives should be available in 2-3 weeks, but customers can currently sign up for wait list.
The drives have a 1-year manufacturer's warranty.

Sounds good enough to me. [Rapid Repair]

According to Rapid Repair's spokeswomen, they just announced the first 240GB iPod upgrade, which will be available for all original iPod Video models. They use a Toshiba MK2431GAH 240GB 8-mm hard drive for the hack, making your old iPod video's capacity double the current iPod classic's space. She also says that they want to do it with the iPod Classic and Zune 2G as well. [Rapid Repair]

When the iPod won't cut it, the DCP951 plays standard DVDs, DVD+/-R and DVD+/-RW, VCD, DivX and MPEG4 movies. Don't plan on any epic movies for your cross-country flights, however, as total play time on a single battery charge is a weak 2.5 hours. The resolution isn't much better at 640x220, but the relatively low $199.99 price tag and small form factor are appealing. It's also shiny, did we mention that yet? [Amazon via Chip Chick]

Prostitutes using the iPod Video to increase turnover [MusicGizmos]

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line. We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

Thanks Steve, but we'll watch our movies however we like, wherever we like. And if you start making decent movies again, we'll watch yours as well. – Jason Chen

Spielberg calls for responsible TV [Reuters]

Worst-case scenario: The panel is an early indication that TV and movies have limited appeal on iPods. Best-case scenario: While adoption of video may be proceeding more slowly than the hype suggests, there is tremendous upside ahead.

My impression of watching video on a small screen? It depends on how small that screen is and how desperate you are to be entertained. I've noticed that I have a personal threshold for the smallness of video that I can still enjoy. I tried a few different screen sizes in my informal field test, traveling half-way around the world and watching a lot of video. Along for the ride I had a Motorola Q which has a 2.25-inch 4x3 screen, an Archos 404 with a 3.5-inch 4x3 screen, and a Sony PSP with a 4.25-inch widescreen.

On a screen the size of the Motorola Q's, it's extremely hard to enjoy any sort of cinematic content, because it's just too damn small. Trying to watch a football game in Los Angeles that I was receiving via EVDO using SlingPlayer Mobile was an exercise in futility, where the players all looked like tiny ants running around on the screen. About the only thing a screen that size is useful for is getting some talking-heads news information or something very simple. Either way, it's hardly worth the trouble.

Moving up to the next larger-size screen, the Archos 404's 3.5-inch 4x3 screen was almost big enough for watching 4x3 content, but still leaves me wanting when watching letterboxed movies. It just seems like a waste of perfectly good video content to watch it on a screen that's just 3.5 inches diagonal. The Archos screen had an unusually shallow viewing angle, not good if you want to watch a video with a friend. But this could have an upside, too—you won't bother your prudish seatmate if you want to pull out that porn vid you've been meaning to watch but just haven't gotten around to.

The Sony PSP is a different story. Its 16x9 screen is exceedingly sharp and is just big enough to enjoy movies. Of course, if you get suckered into buying a movie on the brain-dead UMD format, there is an upside to that: its video is exceedingly crispy-sharp. Even ripped movies from DVDs look like HDTV on this beautiful little screen. Watching movies on the PSP was far more pleasurable than with the other two examples I tried, and the audio sounds great with a decent pair of earphones, making me almost forget I was flying in a pressurized tin can six miles above the planet.

I did notice that the more desperate I got to be entertained on these interminably long flights (one was 18 hours long), the easier it was to tolerate the smaller screens. Plus, if the movie I was watching was really good, I could get so absorbed in the content that it didn't matter much that I was only watching on a small screen. But this is only true with the PSP. Anything smaller than 4 inches, in my opinion, gets to be annoying to watch after a while, no matter what.

One other note: I found myself constantly wishing for some sort of stand or easel that could hold up each of these players on the tray table, because it gets tiresome to hold a player in your hand for hours on end while watching long movies.

Plus, when loading up the players with video, it's quite an arduous process to convert a DVD into a movie that can be viewed on them, but that's getting easier all the time, too.

Summing up, I believe there is a big market for location-shifting using portable video players, because people are sometimes desperate for entertainment. Plus, the threshold of pain varies from user to user; your mileage may vary. – Charlie White

Study: iPod video yet to play big [Hollywood Reporter]

In addition to its extended video playback capabilities, a fully-charged Volta can actually charge your iPod three times if you can't get to a hot USB port or AC adapter. Even though it's yet another device to put into your bag of tricks, this one looks like it could keep you watching video until your eyes get crossed.

Beyond that, it can keep that iPod going for 80 hours of music listening. This is great for those of us who whine about the iPod not having enough battery longevity. If that's a priority, it might be worth shelling out $69.95. – Charlie White

Product Page [Sonnet Technologies, Inc.]

Press Release [Belkin]

If we could have a crush on a podcast, we would be totally crushing out right now all over the recently launched ReFrederator, which puts out a classic cartoon every single day. Some of them star the likes of Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse, Daffy Duck, Betty Boop, Porky Pig, Donald Duck and Felix the Cat—ah, the beauty of things returning to the public domain—and others feature fairy tales and musicals.

Each week of cartoons will have a theme, and this first week's is Mother Goose. If ReFrederator takes requests, we here at Gizmodo are selfishly hoping for a best of Fritz Freleng week sometime soon!

ReFrederator [via Pocket-Lint]
ReFrederator on the iTunes Store

iPod Dock [iPod-Fun Forums (German) Via Cult of Mac]

Think Secret also asserted that Apple may have foreseen technical problems with the new video iPod in February, and that might be the reason why it hasn't aggressively pursued rights deals with Hollywood studios for full-length movie downloads. We think Apple also might be waiting to see what happens with other movie download sites before it jumps in to the movie downloading fray.

As Apple retools new video iPod, release rolls back [Think Secret]

The foreign company, Digital CowBoy, has released a product for all of the fetish porn fans out there. This privacy filter makes the screen on the iPod Video only viewable from directly in front. No more worries about that neighbor on the subway thinking you are a freak. Watch away, friend.

PodCowBoy [Akihabara]

Video iPod Exposed: Guts to Glory, PSP Style [informit]

Iconz for iPod with Video [XtremeMac via The Cool Hunter]

XtremeMac MicroMemo iPod Voice Recorder [MobileWhack]

Options and pricing for XtremeMac products [Shopping.com]

Belkin kickstand case for video iPod [Popgadget]

The Video iPod

The Pitch Abandoning its iconic dancing silhouette in favor of a more utilitarian approach, Apple touts the video iPod with a stark-yet-powerful print campaign. Six of the players are lined up in a row, their screens ablaze with track info, family photos, the title screen from Lost, and rocker-cum-humanitarian Bono. The plain-Jane text at the bottom explains that (duh) the video iPod is for watching video, and that prices start at $299. And there endeth the lesson.

Reminds Us Of Any number of fancy European car ads, in which the mere image of a Jaguar set against a black backdrop is deemed sufficient to excite the senses and pry open the pocketbooks. The copy also has a vaguely pharmaceutical air about it, too, as if the Feds were primed to pounce should Apple make any hyperbolic claims.

The Spin Apple's ad agency, TBWA Chiat Day, can afford to go the understatement route at this point; those little white boxes are so well-known at this point, it's not like they really need to explain what they're for. (Eat your hearts out, Rio and Archos.) But they also need to convince iPod customers to fork over another $300-plus for the video privilege, and a lot of those customers are probably used to equating mobile video with poor quality. So the ads really focus on presenting the crispness of the screen's colors, along with the variety of content available right now, as opposed to a year or two down the line. I mean, who wouldn't want to see the full-color cover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince while listening to the audiobook?

Counterspin There's a practical reason for the straightforward approach, sure, but perhaps TBWA Chiat Day has finally wised up to the fact that its Day-Glo iPod ads are wearing thin? The writing's on the wall, especially after that Eminem iTunes spot that has invited a cease-and-desist letter from Lugz, which claims that the commercial rips off its own ad featuring Funkmaster Flex.

Takeaway Let's give Apple and TBWA Chiat Day some credit for heeding Thoreau's timeless wisdom: "Simplify, simplify." The iPod Video ads are low-cal, but think of them as lean-and-mean rather than unnecessarily skimpy. The white-on-black two-page spread works well with the colored screens, and I'm all for the absence of small print—I kept looking for a "Simulated Images" warning, but it ain't there. There's also some nice visual structuring: the progression from least impressive (audio track info) to most impressive (a backlit Bono) goes from left-to-right, so you end up with a (very) short mental journey from shrugging your shoulders to "Wow." Except, I guess, if you come from a country that adheres to right-to-left writing. Is the order flipped for Israeli magazines? Hmmmmm...

Hype-O-Meter 8 (out of 10); not one for the Hall of Fame, but crisp, nuanced, and easy on the eyes.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Hype Sheet column appears every other Wednesday on Gizmodo.

Introducing the iPod VR! [Make]

BrixPod Lego IPod Case [Cult of Mac]

It's pretty well known that when a new video format comes a 'knockin, the porn guys are eagerly awaiting the chance to make it even more popular. Why do we have VHS rather than Beta? Porn, of course. So when the new iPod Video came out, you'd think the pornographers would be chomping at the bit to get us good, solid adult video to take with us everywhere. However, it seems the industry is balking a bit this time, noting that many young viewers will be using the new iPod, and of course, trying to figure out how best to make money. According to L.R. Clinton Fayling, president of Brickhouse Mobile, a Los Angeles company that is licensing adult material for mobile phones, there will be three guidelines that the industry will follow, "Customers will be age-verified through a credit card, no content will be offered for free and the material will be copy-protected so it can't be shared." Do the Suicide Girls count as porn I wonder??

No Porn for You, Video IPod! [Wired]