Planet Skyron

It’s a challenge, to be sure. The laptop of interest here was happily minding its own business within the confines of Jaguar, deemed the most suitable OS for that generation of Macs, when along came the need to download a video on a portable. It being the newest laptop in the Mac inventory, built and first delivered in May 1999 (terminated in February 2000), meant it would be the one designated to do the heavy lifting involved.

First of all, the iTunes store will not permit downloads on a device running anything less than Mac OS 10.3.9 (Panther). That meant an upgrade of the OS was the first order of new business. Fortunately, the upper limit of OS installs recommended for the Lombard (also known as the “bronze keyboard” Mac) turned out to meet that requirement by a hair’s breadth.

Installing the Panther OS is no small matter when it comes to the Lombard. It turned out, after a couple of failed attempts and a bit of investigation that the Lombard has an issue having to do with the video hardware. About a third of the way through the first install disc, the screen would suddenly go wonky and the whole process would freeze (that is to say, crash). This issue was quickly resolved by reducing installed RAM to 256MB. After successfully installing 10.3, it was tested with all the RAM installed again. As a precautionary, the same procedure was followed during the upgrade from 10.3 to 10.3.9.

Having installed the base system and upgraded to 10.3.9, the next step was to upgrade the iTunes software. The minimum requirement for that was version 7.6. This was found out the hard way, by being advised that the laptop was not up to snuff in the iTunes department whilst trying to download the video. Finding legacy versions of Apple software is often a challenge. Apple makes it impossible to do so on their site. The oldapps.com site, fortunately, archives them.

It is also averred that Quicktime 7.4.5 is needed in order to play an iTunes downloaded video. (Btw, the video that motivated this entire enterprise was a Colbert Report broadcast last July with featured guests, Dirk, Lerxt, and the Professor.) This version of QT requires an OS that can’t be installed on the laptop. It’s a moot point, in any event, as the only purpose for using the laptop is to have the mobility needed to download large video iTunes files; not to play them.

So, finally, the laptop downloads the video without objection from Apple. The next step was to transfer the video to a 5th generation video iPod. This turned out to be not a simple matter of dragging a file to the iPod manually on the laptop. (Automatic syncing on a computer that’s not the home base for your iTunes files is a recipe for disaster, as files on the iPod not on the computer will be wiped off.) Apparently, the Panther OS lacks the resources required to handle this step. It required copying the files to another computer, either over a networked drive or by way of a portable drive (flash or hdd). There are other ways, but these are the most direct routes to the desired destination.

Copying purchased iTunes files from one computer to another introduces a further requirement. Each computer involved must be an Apple authorized computer. To get authorization, you have to select a menu item in iTunes that says authorize. Apple will permit up to five computers to be authorized at the same time. Once this authorization is established on more than one computer you can copy iTunes Store purchased audio or video files between them.

So, after getting the required authorization, the Colbert Report video folder was copied to a G4 computer (Digital Audio) running on Tiger (10.4.11), dropped in a folder called TV Shows (which gets created when something tagged as such is first introduced to iTunes — See File > Get Info > Info tab > Genre). Clicking on the iTunes file in the Colbert folder updated the xml database and brought the video into the iTunes library list of TV Shows. All that was left to do was to simply drag the title appearing in iTunes to the mounted iPod.