Syncing video podcasts with iPhone 3G

I downloaded a few video podcasts through iTunes today, but when trying to sync them to my iPhone 3G, I was given the error message:

“<podcast name> was not copied to the iPhone “<name of iPhone>” because it cannot be played on this iPhone.”

Thanks to the forum, I was able to get these podcasts synced.  Here are the steps I used that now have the video podcasts syncing and playing on my iPhone.  (note: I’m running Windows XP SP3, iTunes 7.7.1.11 and iPhone 3G v2.0.2)

• Download podcast episode(s) from iTunes
• Right-click on an episode and select “Convert Selection for iPod/iPhone”
• Connect the iPhone and click to select it
• Under “Movies” select the converted podcasts to be synced

The conversion process can take some time.  The podcasts I selected were about 15 minutes each and took almost their run time to convert.

Obviously this can become time consuming and is not what most users expected when trying to sync a podcast to the iPhone.  In an ideal configuration, the iPhone would play the podcasts in the original format and no conversion would be necessary.  Hopefully this will be fixed in a future update.