Modern iPods make great video viewing devices. The latest iPod Nano and Classic have good screens, 2.2” and 2.5” in size, while the iPod Touch’s gorgeous 3.5” screen makes for a fantastic viewing experience.

While you can fill your iPod with movies and TV shows from iTunes, this can be expensive in the long run. Another alternative is to download interesting videos from YouTube.

YouTube is the world’s biggest video sharing site, and includes an enormous variety of videos on every conceivable subject. Apart from the funny viral videos YouTube is famous for, you can also find official music videos and fan-made music videos, clips from TV shows, how to guides on many subjects, and watch videos from NASA or full-length speeches from politicians. On YouTube EDU you can even find see entire lecture series from the world’s best universities like Harvard, Princeton, and Cambridge. Whatever your interests, YouTube probably has videos that will match.

The iPod Touch and the iPhone have a built-in YouTube application, but this has disadvantages. It needs a wi-fi or phone connection to the internet, which you might not have when commuting for example. Using video streaming also tends to drain your battery quickly, so you might prefer to download videos directly to your device rather than watch them using the built-in app. On other iPod models you don’t have internet access anyway, so you if you want to watch YouTube videos at all, you need to download them.

This guide will show you an easy step-by-step way to get YouTube videos onto any iPod or iPhone that is capable of showing them.

The method we’re going to follow uses a free online service called KickYouTube. There are many other alternatives but this is the easiest, especially for iPod owners.

The first step involves finding the video you’re interested in on YouTube itself and then starting KickYouTube to process that video.

1) Find the video you want on YouTube. Use the search box and explore until you have the video you want playing on YouTube.

2) Stop the video playing, there’s no need to watch it all the way through.

3) In the browsers address bar, insert the word “kick” in front of "youtube" in the web address that is displayed. Don’t add any spaces. For example "www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoMw2LXiA7Q" will become "www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=HoMw2LXiA7Q".

4) Now hit the enter key to start KickYouTube.

Once the KickYouTube web page has started it will show you the same video in a similar layout to YouTube. Now continue to the next stage.

Sometimes the KickYouTube site is down. If this appears to be the case, simply try again a few hours later.

1) Check that MP4 is highlighted in red in the bar above your video. This is the video format needed for iPods so if it was not already selected click on it to choose it.

2) Click the green “Go” button at the right end of that same bar. This starts the process of converting the YouTube video.

3) Wait until the “Go” turns into a blue “Down” button. (Down stands for "Download" here)

4) Now right click on the new “Down” button, and in the pop-up menu choose “Save As…”. Depending on your browser this option might be called “Save Link As…”, “Save File As…” or “Save Target As…”.

5) Choose where you want to save the file on your computer.

Now the download has started, and depending on how busy KickYouTube is and how long the video is, it might take a little while to finish. In the meantime you can start other videos downloading if you want to.

On the right side of the KickYouTube page there are many related videos. If you want to download any of them, simply click the “Kick” button in the video thumbnail.

This video will now be shown in the main viewing area , and a new selection bar will be added above. You can repeat actions 1-5 above as many times as you like for as many related videos as you want.

Now you must wait until all the downloads are finished. The download window will show overall progress and what percentage of the data is still left to download.

Once all your files are downloaded, you can add them to iTunes and put them on your iPod.

1) Start up iTunes

2) Select the File menu, and then the Add File to Library command from that menu. (Alternately if you have all the files in one folder, you could select Add Folder to Library)

3) Select all the files which you created, and click Open. To select more than one file at a time you can hold down the Ctrl key as you click on the file names.

4) Wait for iTunes to complete any processing it needs to do to add the files to your library.

5) At this point if you want to rename or add extra information for any of the videos, choose the Movies section of the library. Right click on the video with the data you want to change, and click the "Get Info" tab. Here you can edit details like the name, artist, genre etc.

6) Now connect your iPod to your computer and let it sync.

7) Check that the videos have been copied over. Depending on your sync settings you may have to take some extra actions here. For example if you have the “Manage music and videos manually” option set, you’ll need to drag and drop the videos you want from the Movies list to your iPod, which appears in the devices list. This is the same process you use for songs, so it should be a familiar one.

8) You’re finished, now just enjoy your videos!