At her request, got the wife a Sansa Fuze. Now she wants to watch TV episodes on it. I don't know where to begin. My supposition is that either this is so easy nobody has to explain it to anyone except Luddites anymore, or that it's basically illegal.

Do you have to pay for this kind of content if it is already available on Hulu or elsewhere? Does Apple provide free network video content?

Thank you for your kind guidance.

The player supports AVI, MPEG4, WMV, QuickTime, MPEG2, ASF video files that are already on your computer. This means no streaming content unless you have some software that captures streams and saves them locally (which is questionably legal, but since you'd be using it like a dvr...) and also some software to convert the flash video files to something the sansa can handle.

I found this handy tutorial for you: http://gleez.com/board/general/general-discussion/how-put-video-sansa-fuze

Oh, and Apple doesn't provide free network video content. iPhones and iPods don't support Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, which is what almost all websites use for TV/movie streaming.

Thank you, Peter. I appreciate the guidance. I enjoyed "Anyone who has used such softwares can leave some comments and suggestions"

that tutorial is pretty specific to the software he suggests, which isn't free. Both my software links point to free software.

Speaking of Luddites, I wonder what my kids will be like. I routinely do things like:

1. Use NoScript to find the link to the Flash video player.
2. Extract from that the XML catalog which lists the video steams.
3. Use rtmpdump (which I compiled from source) to retrieve the highest resolution stream provided.
4. Pass that HR Flash Video file through ffmpeg with the A/V codecs set to copy, to preserve the actual H.264 and AAC streams, but put them in a standard MP4 container.
5. Copy the file to my USB stick in the folder VIDEO.
6. Enjoy the show on my PS3.

I didn't need a tutorial to figure out how to do that, I just came up with it myself, and found the tools I needed to do what I wanted. Took me about an hour the first time I tried. My parents wouldn't have a clue about anything I even said above. I'm scared what the future holds, when I have kids who can do things I don't start to understand.

Like what, play Football or Lacrosse?

No one understands lacrosse. Don't lie to me.

Heh, you got me on that one.