Still stinging over Apple's insistence that letting the iPod play movies would cause sales to plummet, the stock to crater, and civilization as we know it to crash and burn as people by the billions would use their final breaths cursing the folly of whoever green-lit video on a two-inch screen? As we've said before, we understand all the arguments against it: no one wants to watch movies on a tiny screen, ripping most DVDs (including ones you've legally purchased) is against the law, people who really want movies on the go can just buy a portable DVD player with a bigger screen for less money, blah blah blah. None of that changes the fact that we'd still love to use a color iPod to wow the plebs on the bus with snippets of iMovied home video footage like this one. Seriously, the world would be a better place, wouldn't it? Aside from that whole "collapse of civilization and end of the human race," we mean.

Well, good news: faithful viewer gsxrboy tipped us off to a posting at Engadget explaining how to play video on an iPod Photo, kinda sorta. In a nutshell, you use QuickTime Pro or the media manipulation software of your choice to export a zillion frames from the movie in question as individual numbered image files, export the movie's soundtrack as an iPod-compatible sound file (say, AIFF or WAV), sync the images and sound to your iPod Photo, play the sound file, and then use the Click Wheel to advance through the images in order at an appropriate speed. The tricky bit, of course, is that whole "appropriate speed" bit; it takes a steady hand and a light touch to keep the frames advancing at a constant rate and synced up with the sound. If you've ever tried spinning a record on a turntable manually and getting the music to come out without making George Clinton sound like he was on even more drugs than usual, then you know what we mean.

If you don't know what we mean, then curse your nubile non-record-playing who-the-heck-is-George-Clinton born-in-the-'80s-or-later young selves and scope out the Engadget folks spinning a Star Wars trailer in this 12.7 MB QuickTime movie. (Of course they didn't turn off the wheel clicks; they're like a primitive metronome!) We have to say, that trailer looks a lot clearer than we would have expected on such a small and low-res screen. It may not be how we'd want to see Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but it's perfectly fine for inflicting home movies of Baby's First Spit-up on the rest of your car pool.

So now more than ever, we really hope that the iPod gains video-playing capability that doesn't require moving one's thumb in circles until it turns black and falls off. Not that we're arguing for the release of an iPod Video, mind you; all the arguments against such a beast essentially still stand. But we can't see the harm in adding some form of basic video playback to the iPod Photo (heck, even if it's just a slideshow with a 1/15th-of-a-second delay between pictures) as an "extra" alongside Notes and Solitaire, just so geeks like us can mess with it. And barring that, how long do you suppose it'll be before a third party company ships a clip-on variable-speed thumb-emulating Click Wheel attachment so that Engadget's method produces perfectly-timed iPod video to even those of us with the hand-eye coordination of a seizure-prone marmoset on crank?