i have an ipod video and people have told me that playing tv shows videos etc. tears down the batery life ????

Question

i havent put any video on my ipod yet but i have been thinking about doing so. i have plenty of shows i would like to put on it does the video that you put on it really drag the batery to 2 hours instead of the usual 14 hours why does it do this if it does do that you charge it more often and the batery goes bad so is it good to put video on your ipod

Answer 1

The reason the battery doesn't keep a charge as long is because playing video uses more CPU processing, hard drive, and LCD screen power on the iPod.

The iPod has a Li-Ion battery, which the life is determined by the number of cycles (discharges and re-charges). Technically speaking, the more times the battery is discharged and recharged, the lower life it has.

Theoretically, playing video on the iPod would shorten its overall life. Based on the iPod's 14hr music 'up-time' and 4hr full-recharge time (based on Apple's tech specs), the iPod has almost 2.5 years of constant use (in-use 24hrs per day, charging and fully discharging constantly; based on an average Li-Ion battery having a 1200 cycle life) 18hr cycle (14hr playback + 4hr full recharge) * 1200 cycles = 21600 hrs / 24 hrs per day = 900 days / 365 = 2.46 years. Assuming one listens to their iPod for 8 hours per day, the number of years would be 21600 hrs / 8 hrs per day = 7 years. This does not take into account the minimal drain the battery would have sitting idle.

According to Apple's tech specs, video playback is 3.5 hours. So, each time you drain the battery with 3.5 hours of playback you are effectively reducing the total number of uses by 10.5 hours, when compared to full-time music use. 10.5 hrs when compared to 21600 hours really isn't that significant.

For comparison, if you use the iPod strictly for video, its expected life would be 9000 hours, or a little over 1 year of full-time, 24 hour use. (7.5 hr cycle time * 1200 cycles = 9000 hrs).

Realistically speaking, watching video on the iPod won't cause a significant reduction in the overall life of the iPod, as long as you aren't using the iPod for video all the time, maybe a couple videos per every couple of cycles.

Answer 2

i wouldnt worry about your battery going bad, it does take a lot of temporary battery power though. I have noticed on my video ipod that all of a sudden, within like 3 weeks, that the battery seemed to be going bad. Although I cannot promise that thats the problem, but one exception is that I have a solio (a solar powered charger for the ipod) and sometimes the solios battery runs down and it cuts the charging for a while until it has enough power to charge. In that case the problem would be,as the manual says that the more charge cycles(everytime that its plugged in to power to charge and taken out) the ipod battery goes bad faster. I hope this helped cause this took a long time to write.

Answer 3

They dont tear down the battery, they use up the battery. When u watch a video, the harddrive works harder and the screen is active with framerate 30fps. U shouldn't watch movies on ur iPod all the time. If u want a portable video player, buy a Portabel Video Player (ZenVisionW, Archos, ...)