No Video iPod Coming?

Fuzzball963 writes "ThinkSecret is reporting that a video iPod is not going to be released on Oct.12th. Instead, the announcement will be an 80 GB update to the iPod, along with size improvements on the color models. The analysts seem to say that the video iPod is in development, but that lack of a licensing agreement between Apple and the studios has made it a no-go for now." From the article: "While a video-capable iPod remains in development, without the agreements nor infrastructure in place to deliver movies to customers through a store-like interface, Apple sees little value in releasing such an iPod at this time. Apple insiders have also said executives see consumers needing the capability to easily import the DVD movies they own to a usable format (similar to the encoding functionality provided for audio CDs with iTunes) in order for a video iPod to be truly successful. The complexity to date of accomplishing such a feat has meant only a minority of computer users have dabbled with watching full-length movies on their computer, with most of those having acquired the content through file sharing services."

Comments

Re:Copying your legally-owned DVDs...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need a Mac manufactured in the past two years to transcode DVDs at a reasonable quality in a reasonable amount of time, then Macs are dog-slow. A P4 1.6, which would probably be outperformed by a P3 1.0, can rip at about 40fps. I strongly suspect that any Intel PC manufactured in this millenium can transcode a 3-hour DVD in less than 5 hours. I would be very surprised if this weren't true for Macs as well.

And let's not forget that if you're ripping for a video iPod or something else with a small screen, the resolution will be going from 720x480 (or x576) to like 360x200. That will make encoding a lot faster, even with the overhead of a software scaler.