Gray Screen when trying to Play Videos

Not all videos will play on the iPod, despite playing in iTunes. Highlight the video in iTunes, then click on *Advanced/Convert selection for iPod/iPhone* . Then, take the suspect version off and use the converted one.

Conversion can take a while, so don't plan to use iTunes for anything else until it has finished. Also, even though it has been converted by iTunes, it still may not play. One of my videos, converted by iTunes, would not play and actually locked up the iPod until the battery had drained. Needless to say, I've removed the video from my iPod.

i have the same problem...
to add more to the story...
ive had about 20+ videos in my ipod for over a year, most of which were downloaded from itunes...
havent really used them except while flying, or the rare chance that im not driving on a trip. but while recently trying to play a video, ive noticed the same thing. its a blackish/dark grey screen, that shows the video wants to play...it shows the progress bar, saying its playing one second, then 2 seconds and then it freezes. the ipod is the current version and have reset it and my computer many times. im just about to restore the ipod hoping that solves it. but still have no other ideas as what to do...

oh, and the videos play fine in itunes, all are mp4 or w/e the **** these ipods use as their file types...not .wma

I'm having a similar problem. The screen goes dark grey/black when I play a video, it doesn't even start, just stays at 0:00. All buttons still work, like adjusting sound etc and getting back to menu, it just doesn't play. The videos work on my computer fine. They were bought and downloaded from itunes. I've played them all on my ipod multiple times before - it just suddenly stopped working. Any advice?

And if I try to skip ahead in the video, it just flips and goes black and gets the apple screen, resetting. =/

im having the same problem. ive restored my ipod, removed the movies (mp4) from itunes converted them to mp4 again and reloaded into itunes. it plays fine in itunes but will not play on either of my ipods. i have 2 black 30g and am having the same issue on both.

i am skeptical that both my ipods would have the same hardware problem occur at the same time. any ideas?

UPDATE: I just downloaded a free tv show from itunes and it works on my ipod. hmm... on another thread someone talked about similar problems and mentioned they used Nero to convert movies to mp4s. I also used Nero to convert all my movies. Perhaps a problems with Nero?