I don't have an X5 yet but I did take this into consideration when I was looking at 2009s. I thought I read that the interface on iDrive was similar between IPods plugged in directly and a DVD in the DVD changer that has your music collection on it. If this is the case (I can't test it) than maybe you don't need the iPod since you can just use a DVD-RW to store your music. Maybe a thought instead of doing all that to hook up an ipod.