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It's been a while now since Apple released their video iPods, which have beautiful 2.5" screens that can play crisp videos. Apple also added music videos and TV programs on iTunes that you can purchase and load onto your iPod.

Watching music videos and TV programs on your iPod is all great and everything, but some users are left wondering how they can put DVD movies on their iPod. After all, that's one reason many people buy a video iPod ' they think that they can watch DVD movies on their iPod video. Wrong!

You see, iTunes doesn't have an option like "convert DVD to iPod format." It's completely unsupported, which seems very silly! You would think that after someone spent $299 or $399 on a video iPod, they would be able to put any kind of video on their iPod!

What's also unsupported is foreign video formats, like WMV and AVI. Chances are you have at least a small collection of videos on your hard drive ' and those videos probably won't be supported because iTunes also does not have "WMV to iPod format" or "AVI to iPod format" conversion feature!

You might be left wondering why Apple didn't think to include something so obvious in their iTunes program. I cannot see how they would have forgotten it. My theory is that they have a reason for not including it.

Maybe it's a legal issue. Perhaps they don't want to get anywhere near the chances of movie piracy. I'm not a lawyer though, so I can't confirm anything.

Maybe they don't want you to put a single DVD on your iPod! They could be trying to have a "monopoly" so that some of the only videos you can put on your iPod are the ones that you buy from iTunes. If this is the case, this could be why they prevent you from putting WMVs and AVIs on your iPod also.

Or maybe they thought simply that no one would want to convert DVDs to iPod format! Maybe they thought that users wouldn't want DVD movies to take up space on their iPod (which is strange, because iPods' 30GB and 60GB hard drives are plenty big enough). Or they could have assumed nobody would want to watch a full length movie on a 2.5" screen (if so, they're wrong again).

There's one more theory, possibly the most likely one. Perhaps Apple is designing a "true" video iPod with a larger screen that's geared more towards movies, and purposely leave out the "convert DVD to iPod" feature so that they can add movies to the iTunes store (either pay-per-view or buy-to-own).

Whatever Apple is doing, it looks like they are not thinking of their users. Either they're not brainstorming hard enough in their product and software creation stages, or they're just hurting their customers so that they can make more money in the long run.