I'll be spending far too much time in the near future on airplanes.

Thinking of an ipod, but most of my Thai Music is VCDs.

I don't know how easy or hard it is to convert the VCDs to playable formats on the ipod.

Could use some step by step help, if possible.

I don't know about vcd but my cd's when I archived them I used realplayer and it asked and allowed them to convert to mp3 witch is handy.  Other thing is data files on vcd often can just copy paste change .data to .mpg and they work.  Have a number I did that with.  Will always be one track that does not work.  Don't know why.

You can use virtual dub to convert VCD's into an Ipod supported format, I use it to convert songs into MP3.