Greetings, readers. I hope this post finds you in good spirits all around. I took the kids to Family Engineering Day 2010 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC this past weekend. A good time was had by all, but while this post is not about the trip itself, it jogged my memory about the topic of this post.

When I first moved to the DC Metro area, I took the metro to many places besides work. While I rarely do it now, it reminded of the long commuting times I experienced and what I used to primarily do during those times.  It was a chance to learn about the different interests I had, like enhancing my skill sets in music production, musicianship, web design, etc. The knowledge feeding frenzy came via reading magazine articles and user forum printouts from my favorite websites, and that sufficed very well then, as it does now.

Enter stage left: various portable video players, iPod, iPod Touch, PSP, Gameboy Advance, etc..

Enter stage right: popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Veoh, to name a few.

Image via CrunchBase

My player of choice is the iPod Touch, which incidentally, I use for video playing, net access (when an open wi-fi spot is available), a contacts manager, portable Bible, Twitter, and a few other things. Since I’m a fiend for YouTube content and I keep my iPod Touch on my hip pretty much all day, I find opportunities during daily work breaks, lunch, etc. to catch up my video watching and for further education.

Here are a few tips on capturing video content when you’re on the go.

1.  RSS Feeds. If your player is continually connected to the net (or even if it’s not), you can connect to RSS feeds on your favorite site.  I’ll use YouTube as an example. It offers several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed, etc.) as well as customized feeds for users and tags. If your player is an iPod Touch, you can download the Google Mobile app which includes Google Reader to get your videos that way. The iPod Touch comes with a native YouTube app, so anytime you’re connected to the net, YouTube is in the palm of your hands.

2.  Bookmarks. Bookmark – or physically download your videos – and sync them to your player. Even the smallest 1st gen iPod Touch with 8 GB contains plenty of space for videos, even full length movies.

3. Direct Download. Use kickyoutube.com to download videos directly to your computer and sync (or load) them to your video player. I usually download them as mp4′s (the only format that kickyoutube seems to offer currently) which works perfectly with the iPod Touch as well as the Sony PSP (which I occasionally use as well).

4. Headphones. Is public transportation your primary mode to and from work? As said above, that’s the perfect time to catch up on video watching, and if your player is small, I would suggest (as I do also) carrying a set of nice in-ear headphones…easy to conceal and convenient if your carry your player around like I do.

With a myriad of video content out there, especially instructional ones, this is a great way to use travel or break time to “learn on the go.”  There are a few video formats out there to contend with. I use the Mac platform, but since I usually deal with video conversion for my own needs, I’d be glad to answer questions on apps for both PC and Mac. I’d also be interested to hear if there are Linux and other platform users that have apps of choice.

Until next time, wishing you productivity and great surprises of free time you thought you didn’t have. Enjoy the rest of your week!