Q: I have an iPod nano – the older, tall, skinny one, not the new square one. Does mine play music videos? There’s a music video choice under the menu on the iPod, but I can’t figure out how to transfer a music video that I purchased from iTunes to the nano.
– Chuck
A: The older first and second-generation iPod nano models did not provide any support for video playback.
In this case, the “Music Videos” option you’re seeing is likely a default playlist from iTunes that is being synchronized to your iPod nano and simply appearing with your normal playlists:
In fully automatic sync mode, iTunes will transfer all of your playlists to your iPod nano, regardless of whether or not they contain playable content (or any content, for that matter). In this case, the “Music Videos” playlist will likely be empty, since the default “Music Videos” playlist in iTunes is a Smart Playlist which selects only actual music videos. Since these cannot be played on your iPod nano, they do not get transferred, but the playlist entry itself does.
Note that iTunes does not perform any conversion on music videos to an audio-only format either. Newer iPod models do allow you to play only the audio portion of a music video, but this is based on the iPod itself simply not displaying the video, not on any kind of conversion process done by the iPod or iTunes.
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