I finally broke down and got an iPod. I loaded it up with a bunch of music, video, etc.
I love it. It made my recent trip to Hawaii much more pleasurable, and my upcoming trip to Florida will put it to more good use.
However, I also have an XBOX 360, and had understood that I'd be able to plug the iPod into the XBOX 360, and play music from the iPod on it.
I installed the "Optional iPod support" from XBOX Live.
I plugged in the iPod. The XBOX 360 shows all of my content but doesn't play it. Even worse, it seems to crash the XBOX 360.
I figured out why. The "Optional iPod Support" module assumes that the content on iPods is AAC. All of my content is MP3.
This seems kind of stupid, since the XBOX 360 natively supports MP3.
Microsoft seems to have no clue about this issue yet, and I can't seem to find out anything about it on the web. Hopefully someone really smart will read this and help me out...
UPDATE: Apparently, only some of the songs on the iPod exhibit this action. The songs affected are from a Blue October CD I ripped ("Foiled") on my MacBook to iTunes, and from there to the iPod.
It seems only songs ripped from that particular disc are affected. All the other songs seem to work fine... My bad... ;)
