iPod fanatics unite!

Discovery Education offers a great service called unitedstreaming. It’s a commercial product, but lucky for me my county purchased licenses for all of it’s schools. This gives me access to all kinds of videos (and clips), pictures, lesson ideas, and more, but I do have a problem.

The movies are saved as .asf files, which means I can’t put them on my new iPod with video. A workaround has been found using Quicktime Pro, but after paying for an iPod I don’t really feel like shelling out another $30 or so to make it work. (Especially when a Quicktime Pro license only lasts until the next update.)

So I embarked on a search for a free solution. I’ve had Digigami’s MoviesForMyPod on my hard drive for a while, so I knew when that was suggested as a solution it wouldn’t work – it didn’t have the right codec to decode .asf files.

Then suddenly Flip4Mac came on the scene, due to Microsoft’s decision to discontinue updates for the OS X version of their Media Player. I actually saw references to this nifty app on a cartoonist’s website first, although Mr. Dembo is already hyping it.

So I downloaded it last night and did a restart.

Turns out on my Mac running 10.3.9 it’s only half successful – I can listen to the audio just fine but the pictures are just a wash of pixelated colors. I’m open to the idea that I did something wrong or skipped a step somewhere, but after uninstalling and reinstalling I still can’t figure it out.

Does anyone have a free solution for me to translate .asf files into .mp4 so I can use them in my classrooms?