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iPod Video Coming to a Car Near You
_am99_ writes "In the "one more thing" media event today, an iPod that can play Video was announced. The initial content seems to be music videos that can be purchased from the iTunes Music Store." In related news aquachannel writes "Apple has just updated their iPodYourCar page to include a slew of new car companies. This means that there'll be a lot of cars that you can buy off the showroom floor and use your iPod with your car - right off the floor and out of the box."
Act I: The iMac G5. We sold over a million of them in its first year. What better place to put the computer than right behind the display? Today we're introducing and all new iMac. [It looks extremely similar] Three great new features.
... from your sofa. We've done a remote control, Apple style. It's got six buttons. [Demo: He presses remote and a menu for Music / Photo / DVD / Video zooms in. There's a giant iPod-style interface for music. "I can enjoy my music from across the room and see the artwork."
... it's on an iPod! New silhouette ad with Eminem -- it's not silhouette but a limited color palette. Steve likes the ads so much he runs each one twice. ]
(1) It's even thinner. The 20-inch is now thinner than the 17 used to be.
(2) iSight videocam. The new mac has an iSight built in. The camera has even better specs. Right out of the box videoconferencing without any extra stuff. We wrote a new app called PhotoBooth. [Demo: It has a built in flash - the entire display flashes. There are special effects including "Warhol" and effects that morph your face goofily.]
(3) Front Row. It s a new way to experience the media on your computer. It's an incredible way to enjoy your music, your videos, and your photos
Photos navigates through everything in iPhoto with slide show effects for albums.
"Now, a lot of people watch DVDs in their iMac, and it would be nice to control them from across the room. Now you can." [Loads DVD of The Incredibles with menu that blurs out the typically unusable menu on the DVD with an iPod-style menu. Movie posters and trailers in HD format streamed from apple.com] This remote control, I just wanted to point something that to me captures what Apple is all about. [Shot of huge button-congested remotes next to the tiny 6-button Apple remote]
Specs: Bluetooth, Superdrive, Mighty Mouse standard. 17-inch $1299. 20-inch $1699. Available today.
Act II: The iPod. We announced yesterday that we had shipped almost 30 million iPods. Our market share, 75% of all MP3 players shipping. Five weeks ago we introduced the iPod nano. And you know what? We shipped over a million iPod nanos in the first 17 days, and we could not meet demand. But what about the white iPod? It's been a huge success for us. And therefore, we're going to replace it. The new white iPod. And yes, it does video.
Specs: Same width and height as current model, but thinner. QVGA (324 x 240) pixel 260,000 color 2.5-inch display. h.264 and MPEG-4 at 30 fps. TV out. 30GB and 60GB models. Same width and height. 30GB is 31% thinner than the curent 20GB model [Making it 0.44-inches thick--say wha?]. 60G is 12% thinner than 20GB. 30G up to 75 hours of video, $299. 60G up to 150 hours video, $399. Shipping in one week.
And, by popular demand, we make it in black. They also come with a nice carrying case, to keep 'em all perfect. [Thin plastic sleeve--aw shucks]
[AD: U2 performing live. Oh wait
The new iPod will be 30% thinner than the current 20GB iPod (making it 0.44-inches thick--say wha?), and will feature a 60GB version (which should be thinner than the current 0.63-inch thick 20GB iPod), and editions of both in black.
What's the device named, you ask? The iPod. That's it, just The iPod. Well spare you the Prince jokes. The iPod will have TV out.
Stevie has iTunes 6.0 up there--only about a month after introducing iTunes 5.0.
iTunes 6.0 will also feature video and the iTunes Music Store will feature Fairplay DRMed video downloads (big surprise, right?).
At launch over 2,000 music videos will be made available at a cost of $1.99 apiece. You can download iTunes 6.0 starting today.
Oh, and one more thing...
It's not only music videos you can buy. No, Apple's set up to allow you to purchase TV shows for $1.99 apiece. Get Desperate Housewives or four other ABC shows premiering on iTunes at two bucks an ep. Videos are native QVGA resolution.
More details to come...
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
I noticed on Apple's page that the eMac is gone. It is no longer on Apple's hardware website (except under "eMac for Education"), and it is no longer sold at the Apple store.
I guess the Mac Mini must have made the eMac a bit redundant, so sales of the eMac must have dropped tremendously.
H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats
... :)
MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in
looks like all you need to do is re-encode your DivX as h.264. shouldn't be a problem if you were able to encode the DVD or TV stream to DivX in the first place
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Unless it's Apple's intention that you don't watch the content on your video iPod, this seems very highly unlikely.
The apple store is selling an AV cable to "...connect your iPod to a television -- either directly or via the Universal Dock" - price: $19
#!/usr/bin/english
All iPods with a Dock connector work with the FrontRow remote. All you need is their new "Universal Dock" with a remote receiver.
For more information, click here.
ABC has LOST and Desperate Housewives up for $1.99 in itunes right now...
see flickr photo of LOST page
i mean it'll have to be a much more extensive library, but it is an interesting baby step in the right direction... (that is till we find out the DRM times out/expires or something... wondering what I'm *buying* for $1.99 exactly)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
DivX is a CODEC which implements the MPEG-4 bytestream format. Like XviD and the QuickTime MPEG-4 encoder, it produces MPEG-4 bytestreams of the form playable by the iPod (assuming it satisfies the bitrate / resolution constraints, and has an audio stream that the iPod can play, e.g. MPEG-4 AAC) and any other MPEG-4 player.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From there, the sky's the limit, because you own purchased video forever. Watch as many times as you choose, share between five computers, burn to data CDs or sync to the new iPod.
Sounds like it's exactly like the DRM for music, except you can't burn actual DVDs. Until someone posts the workaround next week.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
They definitely need to up the video resolution (and they will, once the new video iPod comes out next year and they start integrating this with Frontrow), but I'm watching the first episode of Lost full-screen on my iBook and I have to say, the quality is about the same as the 350MB versions I get over BitTorrent. I thought it was going to be crap, but I am pretty impressed. I won't buy much more (maybe Lost, if I pick up the first season on DVD), because they really need to raise the resolution to at least TV levels (640x480 or 720x480) and I don't want to have to buy it twice, but for just 2 bucks, I think everyone should check it out. Plus, it only uses 40% of my processor, which isn't bad at all.
I have been waiting for this for so long! Now if I could just get the Daily Show, Peepshow, or The Mighty Boosh....
sheesh. You were modded funny. maybe you meant it as a joke. Maybe you didn't. =P
:-)
You must be new here.
Read this to understand why it's funny. Notice the editor's comment to the story. Still cracks me up every time I read it.
Au contraire, the new ipod specs say it supports:
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I just downloaded Lost. I figured $1.99 was worth seeing the video quality, finding out out the file size, and watching my favorite TV show of the season while I work. ;-)
;-) ). The video is very watchable.
The file is indeed 320x240, and for 43 minutes and change, is 197 megabytes. The download took a little time; I'm not sure how much since I forgot to clock it.
The video is compressed very well. It looks clear and crisp, and the audio sounds great. In fact, I scaled it up to full screen and had a cluster of people watching a few choice scenes (we were trying to identify the manufacturer of the reel-to-reel drives
This will be interesting... I wonder what sorts of bonus material they will include?
Also, its interesting to note that video is not very well integrated into iTunes (for Windows). For example, when I right-click on the file, it still says "Show Song File." Also, you'd think that Apple, being Apple, would stick my downloaded videos into another folder than "My Music" in "My Documents."
These are small things. However, these are the things that Apple generally gets right.
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger
That said, you don't understand digital video if you don't understand how video at 320x240 could look better than video at 720x480. When looking at compressed video, the resolution is almost useless (after all, my video was 1024x768 when I played it full-screen). The most important characteristics are bitrate and codec (in that order). The bitrate of the Apple videos are about 650kb/s, while the bitrate of a 350MB encode of an hour-long drama like Lost, 24, etc. is about 1000kb/s. However, those are encoded with DivX, XviD, or a couple of other variants of MPEG-4, while Apple uses the far superior h.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10). So that closes the gap considerably.
The third most important characteristic, and again, far more important than resolution (within reason - 64x48 video is going to be resolution-limited with regard to video quality no matter what the bitrate) would be the source video. And here again Apple is far superior. The DivX releases are taken from cable or broadcast signals and these have undergone at least one analog to digital conversion and very likely several. Both transmission methods throw out a lot of data, especially color information, even with digital cable. Then it is recorded to a computers hard drive, typically encoded as a high bit-rate MPEG-2 file (again losing data - even if it is straight DV, you are losing data) and then encoded again to the DivX format for final distribution. Compare that to Apple, which should be able to take the original HD digital masters and convert them directly to the digital format.
Probably the fourth most important characteristic is going to be processing time. Most modern video codecs are asymmetric, in that encoding is far more expensive than decoding. And encoding video is a very computationally intensive process. There is a general tradeoff in terms of computational time and video quality. You quickly run into diminishing returns, but you can spent a lot of time optimizing your encoding, especially along the time scale (compressing using elements from previous/subsequent frames; this is usually limited by the decoders minimum requirements). Apple can probably throw a lot more processing power at the problem than anybody encoding TV broadcasts.
So, yes, the resolution is only 320x240 and that sucks, but the quality is pretty high and the added detail allows it to scale well. The tiling is definitely more pronounced when scaled to full-screen in the Apple video, but the DivX versions have a lot more mosquito noise, which isn't surprising when you realize they are encoding with four times the number of pixels but only two thirds more kb/s.
Overall, the edge goes to the DivX video, but it is a lot closer than most people would intuitively think. Remember, I'm not comparing this to analog TV, which is guaranteed to be better than its DivX equivalent, I am comparing it to a 350MB DivX version. Also, remember that the blurring of interlaced analog television sets tends to make motion video look better than it does on much less forgiving progressive computer monitors. If you really want to compare it to analog TV, you should watch it on an analog TV set, which is what I am going to do tonight.