One of the best features of the iPhone is its beautiful screen and video quality. But where do you find video files to play on your iPhone?

The first choice would be to buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes Store. They have a fairly good selection of both, but it’s not exhaustive. Unfortunately iTunes Store is not available to me, so I have never purchased any video.

There are a lot of video podcasts available for free download, most of them provide a format compatible with the iPhone. All you have to do is find the correct podcast feed (it’s usually labeled as iPod/iPhone compatible or “small Quicktime”) and paste it into iTunes (Options -> Subscribe). Or even easier, browse the iTunes Podcast Directory from inside iTunes.

Here are some of the video podcasts I am subscribed to: Attack of the Show, Best of YouTube, CNET TV, iFanboy, Tekzilla.

But what if you already have a video file and you want to put that video to your iPhone? First you need to convert that file to the right format using a program. There are many free and commercial programs, I’ve tried a few free ones and they worked fine, however I’ve stumbled upon a wrong aspect ratio problem after conversion.

The only program I found that solved that issue is Any Video Converter free version (Windows). (http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free ) This program has more aspect ratio selections than the others, the one that solved my problem was 480X272. It also has many other features, like selecting clips, batch operation, bit rates etc… You can also download a YouTube video and put it on your iPhone. Conversion time is usually not more than half the running time of the video.

Lastly, what if you wanted to rip your DVDs? As always, there are many programs that do the job, the one I use is Handbrake (Windows/Mac/Linux). This is an open source free program that allows you to easily rip any video from your DVD. You can even choose multiple audio tracks and one subtitle language. If your DVD contains a few TV episodes, you can choose them separately and start a batch operation that will rip them all one after the other. Ripping time is about the same as the video running time, so you better do it before you go to sleep.

Now you can make use of that beautiful screen whenever you have some down time.