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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."
Music videos?
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Last time I checked, iTunes Music Store had music videos. Put the video iPod on the market, let the movie folks see the potential just in music videos.
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Granted, it is not as easy as ripping a CD, but if anyone can streamline this into a single-step process(to the end-user anyway), it would be Apple.
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It's going to be a VIDEO iPod. Did anyone notice that free music videos on iTMS, which used to be updated lots haven't since June? Perhaps apple isn't giving them away because they want to sell them now!
I very much doubt they will launch with movies. If they do it will be limited. They will simply market it as an added extra similar to album art on the color iPods.
If it can be connected to any TV.
I mean imagine, you could go visit a friend, and bring your movie/porn collection...
So, I think the lack of a Video iPod is no great loss. What Apple are missing out on is a decent iPod-style phone. According to The Register, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone isn't shifting in any significant quantity.
Up until the iPod nano, I would have disagreed. But now I agree. You already have the screen, input device and battery. Include a mic, radio antenna and basic SMS/MMS and you have a working phone that isn't too big. Just include a little bit of sane battery management (that is, not let the pod drain the phone beyond a certain threshold). With the relatively large battery for a phone they might even catch a niche market for people who want extra long life. In other words I'd much rather have an iPod with phone than a phone with iPod. The ROKR is going about it in a completely wrong way, at least to my tastes.
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You mean much the same way he stated that flash mp3 players were stupid?
He may think so, but he knows how to change his tune when he sees an opportunity to make money.
I have a nokia 6230. This is a regular joe - standard nokia candy bar form factor series 40 - phone. Its not a smart phone / mobile computer / email executive toy. This is a phone marketed to kids / fashion crowd. An updated version is already in the shops marketed as free with a 12 month contract (i.e. in j6p's eyes this is a completely free phone).
.3gp video format which is just a rebadged cutting-edge highdef format repurposed for embedded devices. really gets amazing small file sizes, with acceptable picture.
... You can download the j2me toolkit from sun and write your own programs/games for free. There is open source community around j2me for instance I use j2meVNC for remote desktop access which is useable if not a pleasure. All this rolled into one device Yes it sucks at almost all its 2ndary roles - but then it is virtually FREE!
now using just dvd-decryptor and the software (transcoder) that comes with the phone you can copy a complete dvd-film to the memory card. a film takes up about 100MB. I have a 1GB of cf memory. I generally carry a couple of films and several mp3/aac albums everywhere i go.
Cons:
1. The screen is low resulution so the quality is pretty bad.
2. have to break the drm on the dvd. No legal way to get mainstream content.
3. nokias pc software sucks. Its really really bad - can't stress that enough. If it was even 60% as good as itunes interface i'd be happy.
4. syncs over bluetooth, not fast enough for me, but newer faster bluetooth versions are already here.
Pros.
1. uses
2. Can share music/videos with other peoples phones with a few button presses - all don over bluetooth. No drm thankyou very much.
3. Phone has a built in speaker so several people can watch (squint at) the film.
This phone is a gameboy,video player, ipod,crackberry,phone,pager, calendar,internet browser,wap browser
So for me all apple would be bringing to party is a slick interface, some nasty DRM, and a big fat price tag. It might sell but only because j6p doesn't know how good his 6320 could be.
Apple had better release the iphone in the next couple of years or they're spent.Nokia, sony and microsoft will eat them for breakfast.
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I think the perfect media for portability like this has to be "The Family Guy"... or other TV comedy series... So what if the picture is small and not so perfect... A comedy series is all about whats said anyway. I've laughed just as hard at some crappy 32 MB episode with 320x240 resolution and bitrate worth next to nothing as a high quality dvd rip. id watch it when taking trains and public transport (except at night... as that just screams out "MUG ME")
I may be wrong but you're downright ugly!
tiny cartoon or movie shorts like they already have for gameboy advance (although crappy and pseudo flash based). There are plenty of short videos ..blooper videos, that star wars/COPS spoof .. troops. There could be a whole industry of 3 to 5 minute video shorts and they dont have to all be comedy .Like they may even be HOW TO videos like recipe or cooking videos. However, since i am cheap, I am not paying more than 5 cents each.
If Apple comes out with a video ipod it'll be interesting to see if they allow people to rip their existing DVD's and play them on the ipod. Or will they force people to buy the videos from Apple in some propreitery format.
You know Apple doesnt have to come up with these ideas, people give 'em to them. In my opinion, Apple is more evil and moopolistic than microsoft because not only do they bundle software that competes directly with third party software makers, they also won't open up the Fairplay format. At least Microsoft's DRM formats anyone can implement.
So, while I may not have a huge collection, I do have a reasonably large one and at high bit rates (192+ VBR) they tend to take up some room.
Plus, my iPod has a few essential data files on it (such as the code to manage the iPod written in Perl) and some pictures of the family.
Most phones allow you to play small movies. Some carriers now even sport TV channels on 3G phones.
The much criticized ROKR phone is actually very nice (I own one). pigmy VGA camera but that's still 640x480 more pixels than an iPod can capture AND it records/play videos.
Steve has got to open his eyes and release what the public wants ratter than wait for the industry to provide what they wished the public wants.
Forget feature movies for now. The obvious first step is to start off small and infectious. Watch Apple announce an integration with Google Video. There was an iTunes/Google rumour or hint going around. Video Podcasts, Viral videos, home-made clips, free shorts and portfolio clips The Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa, Leeeroy Let the first Video iPod trade in that content to get the ball rolling. This is a great way to test the water, check the popularity, security, and potential business models for video. Experiment with selling music videos at first, then after all that go for feature movies.
Remember, this is Apple. They're not going to release something that's just "better than nothing." If they're going to release a video iPod, they're going to solve the distribution problems, make encoding trivial, give it an easy interface, and mark it way up. It will be usable by one hand, you will be able to watch and do the dishes at the same time, and it will be revolutionary in other ways that we can't even think of right now. It will also be very, very thin and utterly sexy. Did I mention it would be really expensive?
Unlike MP3's, video files come as Divx, WMV, Real, MPEG2, MPEG4, and a host of others. Even the audio encoding varies pretty widely. That means a strong general purpose chip, which drives prices much higher and battery life down. And, let's not forget, while Apple's stuff is amazingly well designed from an aesthetic standpoint, they always have first-gen problems. I wouldn't be surprised if an undertaking like this was suffering from those behind-the-scenes.
But an iPhone would be exactly the sort of killer that we all need. Imagine being able to sync your phone to your desktop as easily as getting music onto your iPod. Or e-mailing a photograph in two clicks instead of twenty. Or being able to talk on the phone while still looking up a number. Or any one of a host of other major problems with phones these days. A grid computing friend of mine just bought a phone the other day, and it took the two of us about 15 minutes to figure out how to take a picture.
Motorola and Nokia's phone interfaces could use a LOT of help. I'm guessing that's why the itunes phone isn't taking off: It really lacks what apple is selling. It isn't the ability to play MP3's, it's the clarity and simplicity of the interface. Why would anyone want a phone that plays MP3's if it takes 10 minutes of frustration to play anything?
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Think of it as a bonus for people doing video production. I'm not talking about playing video on an iPod, but rather people who want to carry video data from one place to another.
Networking geeks have an old saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." It takes a little more than three minutes to send a gigabyte of data through a T3, assuming ideal transfer conditions. By that standard, 80GB would take 240 minutes, or six hours. If we assume an average walking rate of 4mph for the average person, a pair of sneakers and an 80gig iPod would have better bandwidth than a T3 out to a range of about 20 miles, including the time necessary to load and unload the data via FireWire (@ 100MB/sec).
Video people already like FireWire. Apple won a Clio for it a few years ago, because it gave video production companies a way to move large chunks of data around easily. Directors have come to love the idea that they can buy a Powerbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro for about the price of one day's postprocessing fees, and have immediate feedback to what they're shooting.
For those people, the iPod is an inexpensive, ultra-portable data storage module. You could fill a briefcase with the things for a few thousand dollars and have more than enough space to carry the raw footage for an entire movie around with you.
The same general idea works for photographers and musicians. It's easy to accumulate 80 gigs of high-quality, first-pass data when you're in the content creation business, and an iPod gives you a convenient way to stick all that information into your pocket and carry it wherever you need to go.
Apple already knows that the sweet spot for actual music storage is about 5 gigs. They have a whole line of products for people who just want a straightforward music player. The higher-capacity models are for people who want to carry data.
Here's something I've been wondering the last week. In the flurry of HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray bickering in the press, "managed copy" keeps coming up. To make a managed copy of an HD-DVD, a computer rips it, strips off the AACS DRM, and wraps on a new DRM layer (MS will use Windows Media DRM, of course, and you'd expect other companies to use their own DRM layers). This is all legal and approved. So the studios will let us rip HD-DVDs (with conditions), and the studios believe that HD is much more valuable than SD. So why can't the computer industry convince the DVD CCA to amend their rules to allow managed copy for regular DVDs?
I stand by the statements I've made the past two times that the iPod Video seemed on the cusp of release. Allow me to quote a post I made a few days ago:
I think a previous post I've made still applies to this situation, and I'll reiterate the key points: Every time Apple hints they are about to make an announcement, the media always tells the public that it is undoubtedly going to be a video iPod. And every single time they have been wrong. Does this mean that this announcement is not a video iPod? No. I merely point out that screaming "OMG TEH VIDEO IPOD IS HERE!" every time apple prepares for an announcement is stupid.
This nonsense has just proven my point; yet another Apple announcement, the media claims it can be nothing but the Video iPod, but now, well, not so much. Yes, the official announcement has yet to be made. But consider this; for years the media has been saying that announcements for the next iPod related product was a Video iPod. For years I've been saying they're full of shit. Every single time, I've been right and they've been wrong. Says something about the "experts" making the claims, doesn't it?
I looked at the comments of this article specifically to see if anyone mentioned HandBrake. It makes it super, super easy to record DVDs into H.264 format, which looks amazing. Of course, it does take for friggin' ever. It took like 20 hours to encode a movie to H.264 on my 1.33 GHz PowerBook (if I remember correctly). I can't wait for my family to get an iMac or something to make it faster. Hell, it might even be worth it just to get a Mac mini to use as a dedicated ripping machine, as to not type up your main computer.