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iTunes Music Store Sells Videos
bonch writes "With the recent release of iTunes 4.8 and its ability to manage and play videos, several users are discovering that iTunes is now selling videos through the online store. One example is the 'Feel Good Inc.' single used in the recent rollerskating iPod ad. The videos are provided in DRM-less .mp4 format encoded in 3ivx D4 4.5 and are available with purchase of the album."
Hopefully the next release will incorporate a preview - a few seconds to help those of us who would otherwise have no idea what these videos may be.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
I didn't even know people still made videos.
Lol, that is the first time that happened. The link from the index didnt work. I almost stopped breathing.
:: Pats /. ::
Be a good little boy
-Sam
Suddenly 1GB doesn't seem like enough any more.
I am a leaf on the wind
can soon be rated with the number of available movies of Steven Seagal.
However this could be balanced out with some porn so.... Apple, be wise.
I'm sure this is just a toe in the water for Apple to start offering movies and other on-demand video with ITMS. Anyone who's been watching how movie trailers are hosted by Apple, how iTunes interfaces with HQ trailers, how Jobs has been talking of late, and how ITMS has been dabbling in video can't help but see the writing on the wall. Apple wants to be your one-stop media shop, not just the place where you buy songs or little music players. They're looking to marginalize entire swaths of the old regime in one fell swoop, and for my part, I'm rather looking forward to the shake-up.
Yes, a lot of the preceding has been hinted at by Cringely, there's nothing wrong with agreeing with someone else's take on things. :)
BBspot had an article on this long ago
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I know I would order, as long as it's not too ridiculously expensive or restrictive.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
This video thing is great, but I just wish they would sell higher quality/lossless audio files first. Bandwidth wouldn't be much greater than these video files they will be selling. I won't even mind paying $2 a song if they were in FLAC or Apple Lossless format.
SP
I wonder if this is a sign that the next generation iPods (which are bound to be out fairly soon) will have video playback.
iTMS Australia. Talk about vapourware!
Where's the video iPod????
Building a device perfectly capable of playing video and using it to display photos is insanity.
Is there a stevenote at the WWDC this year? Do you think maybe they'll announce a video iPod then?
Also: if the videos are un-DRMed mp4, does this mean they could be loaded onto a PSP or Nintendo DS play-yan?
>The videos are provided in DRM-less .mp4 format encoded in 3ivx D4 4.5 and are available with purchase of the album.
Who would sell DRM-Less videos? I know Hollywood won't...
Student Research and Development
I think that music videos are the perfect feeler for other non-drm media - like movies. If people really buy videos (which they will) then I think we can expect to see other kinds of video follow... like possibly TV shows through iTunes. Which would make the TV industry a fortune as a LOT of people would pay $5 for a high-quality version of a TV episode even when they could go and find the bittorrents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Forgive me if I state the obvious to some of you, but did anyone notice that iTunes 4.8 has a "convert to mp3" function? Is anybody else wondering what Apple has in mind with that, especially after their previous 7 bun per playlist limit?
That is just what I needed. Another method to purchase & transport porn videos.
an ad with lollerskates.
Obligatory.
I haven't read any comments on how the Gorillaz are the greatest animated band ever. (I do nod in Daft Punk's direction however)
iTMS has had the ability to play music video's for a while so its really not a huge stretch to download them.
Also the video's (atleast from past albums) were freely available from the Gorillaz's website...
C'mon, man, tell us all about how this is a prelude for some awesome iTunes Movie Store. (I'm not being sarcastic.) You haven't posted for a whole day!
In fact, come to think of it, you stopped at comment #666. What could it all mean??
On an related note, I'd really like to take a peek at Robert Cringely's stock portfolio!
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
i know its been in speculation since the ipod photo came out....but do you would think that this might be a precurser to the "ipod video".....
That's about as impressive as predicting that the sun would rise this morning.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think that if Apple wants to have as much success as they had with music, they need to offer a video device. The whole reason they had so many music users was that they had a cool player that everyone wanted as a status symbol.
University of Washington
Student
Do they have older videos available? I'm not that interested in a lot of newer, higher profile artists, but if I can find some old videos that I loved from about 5+ years back, it might convince me to actually give iTunes a try. Second, how much do these videos cost to buy, and how much do the record labels get out of this, I need to know how much disgust I need to have for myself when I start giving the RIAA and their companies my money. (oh the dilemnas)
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Cringle has a great bit on it as well. (Scroll down a bit.)
I have no idea why, but I got to thinking what I'd want in a system like this if I was a studio exec.
Here's my answer
This is the beginning of the flood. The only thing that can compete with is a torrent.
Uh huh, no big deal. Microsoft already provides this service:
http://movies.msn.com/
Not to mention the MSN partner site:
http://cinemanow.com/
I'm personally skeptical of the ITunes movie downloads. Most here would disagree with me due to anti-Microsoft bias, but I personally have always preferred MSN's music service since I get to go through a web browser rather than the clunky ITunes interface (at least clunky on my computer). Plus, I prefer WMVHD over 3ivx.
The videos aren't in 3ivx format, they're in QuickTime MPEG-4. QT reports them as being 3ivx if you have the 3ivx codec installed, which is likely where the confusion arose.
i wonder if they'll provide support to burn dvds if they do decide to offer movie downloads, sort of like how they're supporting burning cds (5 per song) when you download music from them.
HD Trailers
Will the Mini be the device of choice for video content, and the iPod will make video portable. Download it at home, transfer to an iPod, take it with you and play it at a friend's home.
We already know that LOTR used the iPod in a similar fashion.
photosMy Photostream
I've wondered since shortly after the mini was released if it wasn't a PVR in disguise. Virtually every plasma and LCD television sold today features a DVI connector... just like the Mac Mini. Combine that with Apple's excellent streaming technology and the established ITMS distribution channel, and Jobs might be on to something (again).
With a big external firewire drive the mini could make Apple the first serious contender to mass-market full-length HDTV content over IP.
The Archos AV series play videos as well as music. So does the Gmini, but only in one particular format.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
No, pretty much everything you said here is wrong.
The Mac mini is meant to be a computer, nothing more. It was designed to be an inexpensive entry to the Mac product line for people who already own PCs and want to step up to something better. It doesn't have anything like the CPU power required for HD playback. You might be able to squeeze 4 Mbps out of it, maybe, if you hold your mouth just right and you're willing to live with some dropped frames. But anything more is not going to be an option this year, and maybe not next either.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
People are discounting the iPod Photo as having enough power to play videos.
However they discount something that iTunes already does - transcodes media into lighter versions for different devices. For the Shuffle it will shrink down some music. For photos it creates a version of the photo built to fit the iPod screen.
For videos it could easily transcode original media into something tailored for the size and processing power of whatever iPod Photo you had - so even if you bought a more powerful/bigger screen model later, your video quality would just improve that much more with the same media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, at first I thought he was an evangelist or a product manager. The problem is that he bridges divisions inside Apple, knows too much, and is not afraid.
That means he's Avie Tevannian (80% probability). I was thinking Phil Shiller, but a marketing guy would never say the word "dumb" when he could use another word that was more buzzword compliant. Plus, only a technical guy would whack the competition (couldn't resist, huh?).
---
That said, let's get to a use case that shows what he's talking about.
The bad thing about TiVo (and TV) is simple: if you miss a show, you're hosed. Not if you miss an episode, if you miss the whole show. That happened to this season with Lost and Veronica Mars. By the time I heard about them, they were already up to episode 15. Tivo can't go back in time and record shows it didn't know you liked.
However, they all are available on bittorrent. And as it was, I downloaded all of them for viewing when the season ends, so I (and some friends) can do a blow-out marathon.
However, I need to get those episodes from the machine upstairs to the TV. Right now I have a firewire drive that I carry from upstairs to the laptop downstairs. This sucks. The laptop attached to the TV is too slow to stream over wireless, and it's just powerful enough to play the videos (it's an old Toshiba P3).
Enter AirView, or whatever the heck Apple's going to call it. I'll just stream the video downstairs, like StreamBox. Maybe the box features DivX and H.263 decoding, and has one of those hdmi connectors for a pure signal.
Then go back a little: in iTMS I can buy the season that's running while it's on, so I don't have to miss anything. Plus the show gets direct revenue from the customer - today.
This is one of the hidden benefit of TV shows on DVD - the syndication model of TV has been broken. You can sell the show -while it's on TV-! You can get revenue today, for shows that were watched yesterday. Unbelievable. Heck, with FireFly, they made money off the DVD and got a movie out of it. This is an interesting new model, and it's unclear if it's sustainable.
Anyhow, it's speculation, but not too far afield. A few more years and we'll see.
But it's interesting how Apple is moving stuff forwards. You don't see some MS person spouting anything interesting these days, do you?
Ok, now I'm SURE you and Steven Jobs are one in the same.
Points of Evidence:
#1: That stuff about watching videos and listening to music is EXACTLY what Jobs said....
#2: Regular employees, tend to know a lot about their division and not much about other division. Since you know details about hardware and software, this makes you either an Apple zealot (who has memorized all the hardware configurations and knows how to use every software product), or someone allowed to see the BIG picture, which puts you in upper management.
#3: You are not afraid of getting fired: Which means if you DO work for Apple you are untouchable. Aside from Steve (who can really only be fired by massive stock holder no-confidence vote) and maybe Philip Schiller (Who like Steve has also been Seen on TV), everyone at Apple is fireable.
People keep saying you could use it as a PVR, but just how do you plan to do this? Sure, it has DVI, but so does every modern graphics card. From what I've read, its simply not powerful enough to handle video encoding + playback at decent levels at the same time.
To turn a mac mini into a decent PVR, you would need an external encoder, external storage, an IR receiver + remote, and good software to manage it all. At that point, you're talking about a hell of a lot more then the $499 sticker price, and taking up space with external hardware, so why exactly would you want to use a mac-mini for that?
If the QuickTime HD trailers are any indication, you need an iMac G5 or higher. Sure they could cut the data-rate or resolution, maybe even included dedicated decoding hardware in an update.
As it stands however, its hard seeing HD from a box that stutters at a mere single-window Exposé action.
Now I have to spend another 99, just to get the videos. Was looking at the Gorillaz website store trying to decide if I should get the DVD video disk. Probably cheaper than whatever £12.99 works out to in US dollars. (that's, $24.47 according to dashboard's conversion widget).
It's doesn't include the video for Feel Good Inc itself. Oh well. Still the videos are pretty funny.
From what it sounds like they are offering the video for free if you buy the song.
Can you buy the video by its self? Or is it offered for download (free?) after you buy the song?
TruePunk | Games
I know Jobs is talking up HD video, but imagine this: Apple starts selling downloadable movies, but only in standard VHS/broadcast resolution. That saves mucho bandwidth, won't matter to many people watching on small screens (like the rumored "video iPod"), and placates the MPAA and Hollywood, which can reserve HD for DVDs, etc.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I purchased the Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc. single about two weeks ago using ver 4.7. Shouldn't I qualify for the video downloads?
I'm guessing Apple only validates new purchases, eh? Hmm. Anyone else had this experience?
Hmm. Am I the only one who would never ever want to watch a movie on a 2 inch screen? I would never care to look at my picture album on such a screen either, but at least with a camera hookup the iPod Photo is at least somewhat useful. Just as long as they keep a simple, uncluttered music-only player, I'll be happy.
I think they will always produce music-only players. Personally I don't have much desire for portable video either...
But I could see a market for portable video in small chunks, at most TV sized things that people could watch on a bus. iTunes could let people buy small broadcasts and then help load them on a player, making it simple to use.
Also, I think kids will like being able to cart around music videos they can watch again and again and again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's been an option for a little while now, and doesn't require iTunes 4.8. iTunes 4.7 is handling it fine right now.
Really?? Gee, you must be the first person to have ever thought of this. How insightful!!
3ivX has been somewhat of a Mac-centric alternative to DivX. In fact, if you want to watch DivX movies on Mac using Quicktime, use the 3ivX codec instead which apparently doesn't require the DivX movie to be altered as DivX usually does.
3ivX is pretty much a plain vanilla H.263 MPEG-4 implementation as DivX has been. It has some of the added bonus features, but you can pretty much consider it to be just another MPEG-4 H.263 implementation that has been optimized for encoding on PowerPC architectures. I have seen some incredible quality improvements on certain types of video over other MPEG-4 encoders, however nothing to get excited about.
If you want to have a real MPEG-4 encoder with top notch quality, get something that licenses the Dolby or Frauhoffer codecs. These are the real deal and have incredible AAC encoders as well.
As for H.264, I was far less than impressed by Apple's implementation of 264. There are some commercial implementations available that are far supperior to the free encoder with Quicktime 7. I would highly recommend the encoders from MainConcept. They are available for other platforms as well. They are fast and the quality is superb. There is definately a reason Adobe chose MainConcept for their MPEG-2 encoders
Just like EVERY GRAPHICS CARD IN THE PAST 5 YEARS. Give me a break.
Excellent? Really? Quicktime streaming isn't any better than any other streaming technology I've seen. Besides, it's not as if Apple's streaming server is some secret technology that only they happen to have access to (as iTunes is), absolutely anyone else could stream media using the exact same protocols and even the exact same software.
No it couldn't. The Mac Mini isn't really powerful enough to playback HDTV video in realtime on it's CPU, and it only has hardware support for MPEG-2 playback. Nobody is going to want to download 30+GBs of MPEG-2 video just to watch a 30-minute video (minus commercials). So, any HDTV service would use a more advanced codec such as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264)/VP6/etc., which the Mac Mini doesn't have the power to playback.
Besides, if the Mac Mini was intended as an HDTV PVR, it would have come with a 3.5" HDD that could hold 300GBs, not a tiny drive, requiring numerous external expansion devices. Remember the iMac? Jobs would simply never put out a device that needs all sorts of add-on hardware.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Mac mini All About Movies? Just in case you needed some further reading.
For context, click Parent.
Ehh, I don't know about that. All in all, it looks like Apple is simply trying to compete with physical media. For example, it's fairly common to get a booklet and DVD with a CD these days. Now, the ITMS can deliver that content.
I just bought the new DMB album off the ITMS and I got, more or less, the same content you would get from the local record store. A CD, cover artwork, a PDF of the album's booklet, and the making-of video.
Sure, it's 128kbps AAC and copy protected... but it was only 12 bucks and I purchased it in my underwear at midnight. I can live with that trade off.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
but it would be nice to see higher bitrates. I'm really not impressed if 128 kps AAC is better than 128 kps MP3, as I encoded all my stuff at 256 kps. I wish they would offer, say 192 kps AAC's at say, 25% greater cost. This way you'd have more quality, without the lossless re-rip problem.
The link to the song in the iTunes music store:
/ viewAlbum?playlistId=52656051&selectedItemId=52656 014
w a/ viewAlbum?playlistId=52656051&selectedItemId=52656 014
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa
should be
itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/
Ah, no. That's not Avie. Or, if it is, he's telling someone else what facts to allow to dribble out, but not writing the posts himself.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Oh and never mind that they keep relentlessly plodding forward with the video technology like Pixlet and Core Video.
So, yeah, go ahead and scoff. A lot of people scoffed at the iPod and iTunes at first too. However, to those of us paying attention, this almost seems obvious at this point.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
As someone mentioned earlier about the "burn and then re-rip scheme", it is most likely that if and when movies would be sold via iTunes or similar service, they wouldn't be sold as high bitrate for the similar illegal re-distribution reasons.
What about the iPod Photo? It has a color display, a video output so you can jack it up to the TV and the possibility to upgrade the whole firmware from the Internet. Wouldn't it just be easier (but less profitable for Apple) to just upgrade the software in the iPod Photo to make it a ad-blasting-infernal-pocket-movie-monster of yours? Apple would propably make you pay a lot for the video you download (like they do overpricing everything else, too) or fill our innocent minds with AXE commercials every time we want to watch the latest episode of Enteprise (insert crying).
-aso
You're using the wrong version of QuickTime (Windows is the most common cause of this and many other ailments). The CNBC page automatically redirects to a 640x480 stream under QT7, but drops down to an inferior 320x240 alternate for older versions of QuickTime.
Good grief, "3ivx D4 4.5" happens to be my password.
I don't want to end up looking like the guy from Memento with passward tats, but I find mp4 easier to remember.
At the time I agreed with him, but then a few million people, discovered Bittorrent and now use their computesr like TiVOs.
I still agree that I don't consume films like I consume music, but I would love to be able to watch a 30 minute show in my lunch hour, or on the train to work, or whilst I'm waiting for my girlfriend to get out of the changing room.
I see very few reasons why Apple's DRM system couldn't be transposed for TV:
- Watch the program as often as I liked
- Put on as many of my own iVids as I liked.
- Burn it to as many DVDs as I liked
- Only watch it from 5, centrally registered, computers
- Delete it, you've lost it and you have to buy it again
I also think the current price is fair, 79p (99c) an episode, £12 for a season, is perfectly fair for ad free television that I will likely watch once and then delete a month or so later withou watching it again (just like video tape).Movies are an experience for me. I like to watch them in cinemas, or at home on a big screen tv with huge surround sound I really can't see me sacrificing the emersion aspect of film for the sake of being able to watch it on the move, and if I do, I'll watch it on my laptop not my iVid (the screens bigger and its got a huge harddisk). I would love to be able to download a new feature on the day of release, but to be honest, 2-4GB (H.264) is still a lot of harddisk space (I have hundreds of DVDs) and thats before we go HDTV. TV I want now. I'll watch it on my laptop until a iVid is released.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Sometimes you have to sit down and realize someone found an inexpensive way to add value to something it was selling. Videos are produced for promotion and then distributed to various stations for replay. The cost of the video is included in the original marketing budget and it's one of the rare thing artists produce that no one wants to get copyrights on, it has copyrights but the purpose of this thing is distribution to the widest audience.
Considering that, if I buy an album online I sure don't get the picture and text one find on the physical album but I get the video produced for it, neat, very neat and it cost Apple a big nothin' (tv stations don't pay to get video, some conditions may apply but no money -- I work in this field btw, that's why I know about this), which means the price for song and album remain the same but I get more with each buy...
Now it's worth it to buy an entire album wether I like all the song on it or just a few...
My PowerBook has a 1.5GHz G4, slightly faster than the Mini, and it can happily handle 720p, but not 1080i, so I imagine the Mini is in roughly the same boat. I suspect that it would be possible to offload some of the processing load of H.264 to the video card, which has probably not been done in the first release of the codec[1]. For online delivery, I imagine they would probably go for lower resolution - something about DVD quality at around the 2Mb/s mark. The Mini comes with a 40 or 80GB hard disk, which is enough for around 40-80 hours of video at 2Mb/s - a fairly reasonable video collection, especially with the option to burn to DVD or (Super)VideoCD.
[1] This is pure speculation. I haven't looked at the Apple implementation in any detail, however it would only need to offload a small amount to make a significant improvement and the GPU, being (in essence) a highly parallel vector processor, is ideally suited as a target for this kind of thing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
gees and you guys don't even mention the most obvious thing of all: what other company has all this lined up and just happens to have a ceo who is also the ceo of one of the hottest animated film companies ever? i mean, if steve jobs can convince the music industry to go along with his plans, it wouldn't be hard to imagine him doing the same with hollywood where he is viewed as something of a demi-god. the more i think about all this, the more i think you all are right. i think apple is lining things up for a shot at a movie download service. looking at it all, it would almost be a shame if they didn't give it a shot. they're in the best position to pull it off.
You will notice there is also a Dave Matthews Video and Video Booklet for sale on the album 'Stand Up'. It seems you might notice these types of gems out there all over the store. Has anyone downloaded a Video Booklet??
I've wanted this feature for forever- being able to add music videos to an iTunes playlist so that if, say, I'm entertaining people, I can have the visualizer playing for the regular audio content and the actual song video playing for those songs that I have a video for...
When will they start having tv shows? I cant wait to buy tv shows ..especially the old ones i grew up with.
They are overrated anyway.
I once met this chick who had only been with women but wanted to be with a man to see what it was like.
She had absolutely no clue as to what to do. Some of the worst sex I ever had. She tried to give me head but couldn't do it worth a damn.
I was in Fiji recently and my brother whos living there pointed out that Fijians for some bizarre reason LIKE Steven Seagal movies.
I was andr remain perplexed..
This is somewhat off topic I know.
For what its worth, I bought/ripped a cd at 256 kbps mp3 after having purchased a song from it as 128 bits aac. On my ipod (which doesn't tell me which one is which ) with pretty good "shure" headphones I can't tell the difference between the 2 songs at all.
That may be true, but it won't be the current mini. As another poster pointed out, the mini's hard drive and processor are not up to the task of HD.
Consider the recent hardware launches. Apple waited until the release of 10.4 to put half-decent video cards in the iMac, eMac, and base Power Mac. When Apple introduces on-demand video, it will introduce a new machine to match.
Parent post is in no way flamebait, but is getting modded as such because it isn't saying nice things about the mac mini. Please make sure these mod points abusers get no more points to use for their zealotry in future by meta-modding them as "unfair".
It's time for us consumers now pay to look at ads too?
That's what Apple says and I've verified that a G4 doesn't cut it - on my 1.5 GHz G4 PowerBook the HD videos Apple has up for offer play at much less than 30 fps. Totally unacceptable as a video component. The Mac mini is the only current Mac that seems viable as a set top box, but that has a lowly G4 and tiny 2.5" hard drive - it's right out. No one is going to put a G5 tower next to their HD-TV and the iMac G5 has an extraneous display and would be precariously balanced on or near a TV, so you wouldn't want it there either. Of course this may mean they have a G5-based set-top box in the works, but then they have to deal with the heat - having fans in such a box won't cut it IMHO, and it needs to be thin. The "year of HD" may be coming, but I don't know if it will be soon.
--- What?
I've not seen one video available as a separate purchase yet, though they might come to that at some point. I think that would be silly, given videos are, to begin with, a promotional tool for albums.
Wich is just what the current videos seem to do. They are free, but come with the entire album only.
Good idea, still, for the music majors.
However, they take forever to download through our company's proxy. I'll compare with direct broadband at home tonight. Stay iTuned (har!).
I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD through the ITMS this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see that the 55MB video that downloaded along with my purchased songs was of extremely high quality. Playing at full screen on my 23" apple studio cinema display, there was hardly any noticable artifacting. The video was as clear as a DBS satellite broadcast on a regular television. That's impressive considering the small size of the video and the many pixels the 23" monitor pushes. I bet the apple types would say it's that new codec H.1234 or whatever it is. Sure was purty.
or whilst I'm waiting for my girlfriend to get out of the changing room.
Just because you follow her around the mall doesn't make her your girlfriend.
Good luck to those idiots who still keep using their credit cards for iTunes. Mine ended up on a russian hacker site and my account had been cleaned out. Tons of trouble with my credit card company that refuses to cover this.
Nobody is going to want to download 30+GBs of MPEG-2 video just to watch a 30-minute video (minus commercials).
Get your Numbers right
Broadcast quality mpeg-2(8 megabits) runs about a megabyte a second. So 30 minutes * 60 seconds = 1800 total seconds for a 30 minutes clip.
1.8 gigs is a far cry from 30 gigs. While that is broadcast quality and not HDTV quality, HDTV is not going to be of a 15x the size.
I did a quick google to find the size of a HDTV stream... The EyeTV guys write it up as about 8 GB an hour.
You can get DRMed full length movies, as many as you want, from Real and Starz now for $13 a month. The quality is excellent, and if you commute long distances able to use your laptop, it's pretty cool.
The catalog is actually pretty big, 400 titles I think. The picture is damn good on a TV as well (you'll of course need a video out).
R(k)
only mac fan can afford to pay when they don't need to, no wonder Jobs is rich
Cmon... Some of us don't give a rat's butt about IP or this other entertainment fluff. Some of us are more concerned about seeing a G5 in a PowerBook so we can get some work done (and have time for the fun stuff later). Sure, I picked up this thread b/c I'm curious about Apple diversifying it's media content. But frankly, I'm increasingly worried you guys are more focused on that stuff, rather than putting more R&D into your laptops. Geez making a handheld that runs something like OSX and plays a bit of media would be a big help.
Spelling. Grammar. Punctuation.
Okay, so that's actually 3 reasons.
And no, I'm not trying to be snarky here, it's just that the real stevej@apple.com does occasionally send emails to people, and they don't look or "sound" like ASoT's postings at all.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I'm going to dispute the notion that there would be a large market for portable video in an iPod-like form-factor any time soon.
I used to think exactly as you do. A lot of people have the radio on, or music playing all day in the background. If they have the TV on that much, it's mostly for the audio. They might look up at it when they hear something interesting, but that behavior isn't going to translate into demand for a video device.
Then I saw people with clips on their smartphones. It was a great conversation point. Initially for the novelty, but it was easy to imagine people continuing to pull out their portable and show their friends and co-workers a short video clip on a regular basis long after the novelty wore off.
People like having points of common experience. In our recent past, that was provided by things like network TV. These days though, the media landscape is increacingly fragmented. The chances of 3-4 people all having seen the same thing on TV the night before are much slimmer, but with a portable video device they have the ability to connect over a great segment on the Daily Show, or a great football play, etc.
No doubt it won't be HD quality content though. It doesn't even have to be NTSC quality, though the bigger the files, the better Apple's prospects of continuing to sell upgrades to the installed base by helping deliver demand for devices with larger and larger capacities.
And its depiction of the importance of a select few influential trendsetters. The marketing of the iPod was a textbook implementation of Gladwell's recommendations.
What matters most in computing these days? Security. Who are the abiters of what is secure? The alpha geek community. OSX would not be nearly as well-sold in the media if it did have so strong a pedigree from the computing intelligentsia.
Apple cares about the trendsetters. They don't care about hobby hardware hackers, but they do care about their reputation among the computing elite--particularly with respect to their portrayal in the media.
Apple and other companies turf Slashdot because they know it's the first link in the chain to earned media (at least w/respect to tech). First the topic gets raised and hashed to death here, then it shows up in trade publications, then it surfaces in the mainstream media.
Actual facts appear to be enclosed. Refreshing.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Right, which explains why I've never seen anyone watching a DVD on an airplane, train or bus.
Hey, wait...
The problem isn't that video doesn't benefit from portability, the problem is that the need for portability is, at this point, pretty adequately addressed by the DVD medium itself. You still need a "big" screen, so the iPod can't add much portability to the equation, and there's not much UI challenge in assembling playlists of (at worst) 5 or 6 30-minute TV shows (or more likely, one movie), so there's no value it can bring on the UI side.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
A choice would be great. You can either have a lossless file that you can't burn to CD or a lossy file that you can burn to an audio CD. Before I got my iPod, I needed to be able to burn tracks to an audio CD to take them with me. Now, with my iPod, I no longer have that need.
Of course, I do burn them to a data CD for backup purposes, but that CD can't be ripped -- so that's something different and that right should be protected.
The point is that DRM licenses can be customized quite a bit. It shouldn't be hard for that to be a preference in the store. Seems to me that lossless quality should be that kind of an option.
RP
Besides, if the Mac Mini was intended as an HDTV PVR, it would have come with a 3.5" HDD that could hold 300GBs
...
Not to mention, an integrated Video In jack and TV Tuner, plus Composite/S-Video Out and Digital Audio Out... And a remote control, or at least an IR port
I think QuickTime streams look better than Real and WMA and you're either on crack or deaf if you're going to tell me that Real and WMA audio sound better than AAC. Oh, and btw, QuickTime Streaming Server is open source as Darwin Streaming Server. To me, if as you claim it is no better or no worse quality than Real or WMA, then being free automatically makes it better.
No, the Mac mini does not have hardware support for MPEG-2 unless you consider an AltiVec plug-in hardware support. Apple is touting the hell out of the scalability of H.264. No doubt they will stream the version your hardware/network can support just like they do now. You think they built Xsan for fun?
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Sweet, soon I'll be able to watch videos on my iPod Shuffle.
... a processor powerful enough to playback HDTV
... a video card able to decode MPEG-4
... an OS that includes a H.264 client
... a BTO option for a 400 GB, 7200 RPM internal hard drive
... a double-layer DVD burner capable of archiving large movies
... a VESA mount for dramatic installations
... and a 17" or 20" 16:10 aspect ratio screen built in?
Give up?
Now that's what I call an Apple PVR!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Wow. I LOVE the fact that a comment that opens with the sentence "pretty much everything you said here is wrong" can get moderated up to +5. That rox.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours. I call bullshit on this one... here's why: The hard drive in an iPod MINI is a standard 4/6 GIG CF microdrive, with the interface slightly modified, to produce a special less reliable drive just for this device would be idiotic. The normal iPod uses a slightly larger 1.8" (I believe) drive. For the sake of argument, I'll only talk about the 1" drive that I know about. 1" drives from Hitachi have a 1,000,000MTBF. For those who aren't good with math, you could leave the drive powered up and spinning for a long long long long long time before it would fail. However, they have just a 300,000 count MTBF for spin-ups. This reduces the practical life of hte drive extremely, but for iPod users, this translates into 300,000 songs probably, maybe more since there's a 32 MB buffer.. (or was that a lie too?). Now the discrepency.... This drive is not special. It's the same drive people are using in PDA's cameras, portable video players, etc. My Zaurus SL-C3000 has a 4gb microdrive embedded in it which it uses as a SYSTEM DISK and SWAP. This results in the disk powering up and spinning a LOT. That's a strong statement to make about the reliability of these disks - to not put the base system on flash memory. What's more, the iPod acts as a disk drive when hooked up to a USB port. I know two doofs who bought them and use them as dvd/divx transports between home and work. They'll play the movies straight from the iPod every day, day after day after day, and at a bitrate you wouldn't realistically have on a movie sized for portable viewing. You don't have to have HD content on a portable device and there is a such thing as compression. I can squeeze a feature length movie into 200MB and it's fantastic on a 640x480 pda screen. Why go from no portable video to HD portable video. It would make just about no sense. Since you're clearly wrong on this in terms of the drives having "10s of hours" of life when spinning constantly, I wonder how wrong you are on everything else you say?
The Mac Mini isn't really powerful enough to playback HDTV video in realtime on it's CPU, and it only has hardware support for MPEG-2 playback. Nobody is going to want to download 30+GBs of MPEG-2 video just to watch a 30-minute video (minus commercials). So, any HDTV service would use a more advanced codec such as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264)/VP6/etc., which the Mac Mini doesn't have the power to playback.
Besides, if the Mac Mini was intended as an HDTV PVR, it would have come with a 3.5" HDD that could hold 300GBs, not a tiny drive, requiring numerous external expansion devices. Remember the iMac? Jobs would simply never put out a device that needs all sorts of add-on hardware.
Absolutely! You're describing some sort of large-scale upgrade scenario if that were to happen.
And we know Apple's not interested in some limited release/test market/upgrade/widespread release treadmill. What a pain in the ass for Apple!
One of the biggest challenges so far is the chicken or the egg dilema.
The TV stations are bidding there time until they think there are enough High Def tvs on the market to justify the very expensive switch.
Fortunately, at http://www.lcd-tv-reviews.com/ new LCD tv's are coming out all the time. The prices will keep coming down and the quality keeps getting better.
Soon...
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
Star trek seasons cost that much I think.
I only mention $5 because I think the real price point will be a dissapointing $10 at a grab for money, which will mean a lot of trips to torrent trackers still. $5 is where I start to get interested because there are really only a few shows I'd pay to buy at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The TV stations are bidding there time until they think there are enough High Def tvs on the market to justify the very expensive switch.
Fortunately, at http://www.lcd-tv-reviews.com/ new LCD tv's are coming out all the time. The prices will keep coming down and the quality keeps getting better.
What I think might happen is that HD programming may tip with online viewership first.
We conducted a poll on the site a few months ago and many people were interested in a TV that could also function as their computer monitor. Sorta like a super webTV consule, but with a much better interface.
I understand that in Sweden quite a few people use their monitor as their TV and vice versa.
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
Legal delivering of video content is a good thing and I'm really waiting for it. But I see a lot of competition here already. Netflix costs less than $20 a month and you can get 10-15 movies in perfect quality for this money. I'd pay some money for convenience of downloading, +$20 at most for very good quality. So to shift me someone should sell this content for $3-$4 per 1.5 hour, or $2-$3/hour - not more.
Another problem here are cable providers - those who sell internet access may like the idea, because this would increase amount of installations, but also they may start selling the content on their own and they can make prices very competitive. And bandwidth usage - I can imagine how "happy" they'll become when everybody will start downloading those gigabytes of content at around 6pm every day and they are not getting a penny from their resources exhaustion.
The first commandment: Thou shalt learn the meaning of the word "paragraph."
Likely there will be an apple video player, quite possibly an iPod-something-or-other just to cash in on the success of the name.
Now, there's no reason it has to be a lot like current iPods. Sure, it will probably play Mp3's, maybe it will look similar, but Apple tends to know what they're doing with hardware (some notable exceptions, yes, but they've been doing rather well lately). They're not going to release a modified iPod that sucks as video, more likely they'll release a new product with very different internals that does video and might look or be named similarly to an iPod...
There needs to be a protest video against music videos!
i always wondered who watched that crap
-ASOT
Quicktime had better streaming 5 years ago than anyone else. Quicktime still has better streaming than most technologies when used without a specialized server.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The reason why I think $5 (or even possibly $10) episodes would work is the immediacy - no waiting for the DVD.
And the people I see mostly buying it are people that messed up recording, or simply cannot get HDTV. A person who has an HDTV is also likley to be able to afford a computer then can hook up to the HDTV in order to get shows they really like with good quality.
I downloaded the Battlestar Galactica torrents exactly because I could not get an HDTV feed of SciFi. I would HAPPILY have paid $5 an episode. And if you miss an episode of a reality TV show you really like then you basically will either buy it before the next weeks episode, or never. So it's getting money out of something they do not sell at all right now but there is a real need for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Talk to anyone who sells computers to consumers. The vast majority of the time the conversation touches on viruses, spam, spyware, etc. That's security, whether it's called that specific word or not.
Or read any review of a Mac product. Major media outlets review Mac computers and OS's, despite their super-low market share. Why? Because they help tell the security story--the major story of personal computing this decade.
Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours
This is bullshit, and all sorts of other Apple employees are quite pissed at ASOT for repeating it.
There are reasons Apple doesn't want employees ad-libbing like ASOT does, and this sort of best-intentions misinformation is a perfect example.
As an Apple emplyee myself, I have little doubt that ASOT works for Apple. I also know how working here gives one a ton more insight into what the company is up to. But that doesn't make people an authority in every area of the business, and seeing that ASOT appears to have no self-restraint, it'll be no surprise when he finds himself in a noose of his own creation.
I would like to own the star trek seasons, but my personal limit is around $50 for a season.
Odd then that I would be fine spending $5 an episode, but that's just how people are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Surely you heard the story about the Apple employee who installed Mac OS X Server on an iPod to test it and burned up his iPod hard drive over a weekend?
Sounds like Apple is paving the way for streaming video and pay per view online if you ask me...
Microsoft, REAL, Tivo, Netflix, Google, Kazaa, Napster...
They are all in just as good of a spot to start delivering HDTV video as Apple. Perhaps better.
The only thing I'm "soffing" at is the parent's statment that the Mac Mini is designed to be an HDTV box. It's clearly not up to the job, and not designed to be.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What the fuck is that? Please speak English, or at least geek, instead of MartketingSpeak.
And when you've bought it, head over to http://www.misticriver.net/ to figure out how to use it.
"Figure out" how to use it? WTF?
iRiver = iPod Killer.
I'll believe this when it happens. Do you have any evidence of the iRiver having sales anywhere near the level of the iPod's? Nearly every MP3 player has claimed to be an "iPod Killer" at one point or the other. Yet none have made an impact on the market.
The fact that they need to promote themselves as the "anti-iPod" instead of touting the actual merits of their players, just strengthens Apple's brand image, and shows the weak position the competitors are in. Why are they trying to copy the iPod instead of innovate?
... and then they built the supercollider.
All of those examples either lack the control over the hardware, the user base, the operating system or the infrastructure to do what Apple is in the position to do. And as one other poster points out, they also lack Steve Jobs who happens to have a connection and stature in Hollywood via Pixar that the others don't. That's worth a lot if we're talking about negotiating an iTunes-like movie service. Apple's CEO can speak their language, understands what they want, their expectations, will be partly on their side and more immediately trustworthy because he's also the CEO of Pixar. The others can't relate in that way and in business, that means a lot.
They are all in just as good of a spot to start delivering HDTV video as Apple. Perhaps better.
I'll concede that any one of them has a good start, but none of them are in as good a position as Apple... not even close really. Even the best of the bunch (MS) has huge problems. Their video technology is (as Gates himself has admitted) lagging behind Apple's Quicktime significantly.
The only thing I'm "soffing" at is the parent's statment that the Mac Mini is designed to be an HDTV box. It's clearly not up to the job, and not designed to be.
Fine, you're right about that, but don't you get some sense that Apple's latest changes to its hardware seems to be moving rapidly toward more compact, less intrusive, and that it looks suspiciously like the design work is heading for some kind of non-computing component? That, coupled with all the other stuff that's been mentioned here, makes people think of a home entertainment box. I don't see much to scoff at. It's the observation of someone paying attention to all of those things.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
You're probably talking about MPEG-2, which is very easy to decode. Try with H.264 or whatever other high-end codec, and you're certainly not going to be able to handle it.
And I suspect you're completely wrong.
Which would mean it's not HDTV, and the situation is then completely different, and not what this thread is about.
Again, that would be (compressed) DVD-resolution material, not HDTV. Besides that, the 2.5" hard drive just isn't up to the job of being a muiltmedia machine. They don't handle always-on, heavy loads for very long. It's very simple, if it was meant to be a media box/DVR, it would have come with a 3.5" HDD.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That would be fair enough, if you didn't completely blow the numbers as well.
The "EyeTV guys" are wrong. HDTV is 19.4 Mbps
No, but it's much larger than you believe. Doing it quickly in my head, I forgot the step of dividing by a factor of 8 (Bits to Bytes). It actually works out to about 4.4 GBs or 35Gbit.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Video/audio codecs have NOTHING to do with streaming support.
Besides that, quicktime just uses MPEG-4 and AAC, which ANYONE could use. REAL uses them too. You don't seem to know anything about multimedia.
I'm well aware of that. I was using it about 6 years ago, IIRC, when it was first made available.
This is complete nonsense. We are talking about technical qualifications, and whether quicktime is better suited to delivering HDTV than other streaming servers. Whether you can use the server for free will make NO difference to you.
It comes with an ATI Radeon 9200 which has hardware MPEG-1/2 playback. Perhaps the Apple version is crippled, or perhaps the software interface just isn't there.
No, but they certainly didn't build it for HDTV.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not really a pain for Apple, but certainly a pain for Apple users. As this is the company that came up with the iMac and all sorts of other all-in-one products, it seems crazy to suggest they'll start now. And the evidence being quoted as supporting the idea that the Mac Mini is an HDTV machine is pretty ridiculous as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Obviously, for the task in question, it would be used with (many) specialized servers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Control over hardware is not required. In fact, they're better off than Apple, because they aren't stuck with Apple computers that have a built-in monitor, or aren't powerful enough to even playback HDTV.
Control over the operating system is even less important. You just need to install your application on top of the OS, and you're set. As I said, by not being tied to one, you're actually in a better position.
Actually, they're in a better position than Apple.
Apple's Quicktime happens to be using the open codecs AAC, MPEG-4 and H.264. Gates can use them just as easily as Apple can. I would like to see your source for that Bill Gates quote also. WMV9 isn't as good as H.264 (which Apple really doesn't have much ownership of, BTW) but it's close enough to be a working alternative. So is VP6, which is why all 3 are in the BluRay and HD-DVD specs.
No, it makes them jump to the conclusion of a home entertainment box. Big difference there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Actually, I disagree with you there. With most people getting HDTV through cable/satellite, it seems the best HDTV device to get, is a firewire card. Getting an OTA HDTV tuner would be wasted on most everyone.
Well, they do have S-Video if you want to buy the adapter, but you have a point.
Very true. Not to mention a faster processor.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, not required, but definitely advantageous. How you can look at the Mac and the iPod/iTunes combo and not come to that conclusion is beyond me, but if you don't see it, it's not worth my time to argue it. For a long time, the conventional wisdom in technology was that Apple was trapped by their own "closed" system, but Steve Jobs has demonstrated that it's actually an advantage to control (in his own words) "the whole widget." It has allowed them to make strides in the last few years that other companies, who are largely dependent on the cooperation of others, can only dream of.
Actually, they're in a better position than Apple.
We'll see. That was also the general consensus about Apple's competitors with the introduction of the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. They have proven the naysayers spectacularly wrong in that assumption. I don't doubt they can do it again.
I would like to see your source for that Bill Gates quote also.
Heh, so would I! I've looked around, but I can't find it. It wasn't online, but in a print source I have somewhere so it makes it a little hard for me to find, but it was from about a year ago. There was an article in Wired or MacWorld or somewhere where the writer described being present as Gates paid a visit to the team working on Windows Media Player and its technology. Someone was demonstrating for the group what Apple was doing, and Gates made a comment to the effect that they were way behind and told the team directly that they have a lot of hard work ahead of them to catch up. The writer made it clear that Gates wasn't happy with what he was seeing.
I don't blame you if you think I'm making that up, but I'm really not. I was fairly surprised by it too.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
I just bought the "feel good inc." song on iTunes...now how and where do I download the video?
I have just bought the "feel good inc." song from the danish iTunes. How do I download the movie then?
Surely you heard the story about the Apple employee who installed Mac OS X Server on an iPod to test it and burned up his iPod hard drive over a weekend?
Yeah, and I've also heard the story of the guy who strapped a JATO to his car and smashed into a mountain.
True, video is an immersive experience, but so is gaming. -And mobile gaming has been huge since DonkeyKong. Today PSPs are selling quite well, and while the whole optical disc thing is questionable, Sony seems to be on to something. I take the argument, that the iPods hardware isn't up to the task, but that is really solved with changing the hardware, right? So, please explain again why a videoPod wouldn't make any sense, why there's zero reason for video to be portable, and let's not go into that whole content/distribution thing for now. That will eventually be solved.
mobile gaming has been huge since DonkeyKong
For one reason and one reason only: children. What you call "mobile gaming" has a better, shorter, more succinct and accurate name. Toys.
Apple is not a toy company.
Define "toys"... And then please define "entertainment".
The point is whether there's room in the market for mobile, immersive entertainment such as video.
The day Apple entered the music business, they entered the entertainment industry. ...toys or not.
While we're on the subject of the Mac Mini... ASoTV, what is your view on the story/theory that the mini was almost designed with an integrated iPod dock?: http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/macmini/macmini_i pod.html
The hardware evidence looks convincing and it seems like a winner of an idea, the question is; did apple change their minds on this at the last minute and why?
Your insight would be appreciated on this one...
I can't fault the psychological observations on this: immersive vs. passive media is an obvious distinction. But I have sat on enough trains with my iPod, played enough Music Quiz, to know that there are times when having video functionality on an iPod *would* be desirable. Not as a primary function, but as an add-on.
t ion).
But I'm less sure about the buffer cache issue. Firstly, current iPods may (and they do indeed) have 32MB of buffer RAM. There's no reason future, video-enabled iPods would have to adhere to this restriction. RAM is cheap, and getting cheaper. But even 32Mb wouldn't be too terrible for video playback buffering.
Let's assume that we take your baseline figure of 1Mbit (and I assume the iPod's screens are smaller than the quoted 720x486, so I'll guess half that data rate is actually more realistic. But for the moment, I'll stick with that 1Mbit figure). That 32Mb buffer will hold 256 seconds worth of data, or just over 4 minutes. I've just clocked my iPod and it transfers at a rate of about 14Mbytes/second, so will refill that 32Mb buffer in just over two seconds. After plugging it in, it took about the same amount of time to spin up and stabilise. So, in order to get 1Mbit of video playback, you only need to run the hard drive about 5 seconds every 4 minutes.
To take your "tens of hours" active lifetime quote, that puts the MTBF in the order of "hundreds or thousands" of hours of continuous playback, which is then far beyond the MTBF of the battery (or at least the mean-time-before-unacceptable-performance-degrada
There are technical reasons for not doing video on the iPod, but the hard drive 'aint one of them.
-- call
Apple is not a toy company. You don't see them trying to build the next Game Boy.
You can tell if it's Ive, cuz he has an accent, moron.
Nobody ever claimed that. -All I'm saying is that the market for mobile immersive entertainment is quite huge. So even though a videoPod seems stupid, maybe it really isn't.