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Ars Technica Vivisects A Video iPod
phaedo00 writes "The guys over at Ars Technica have put together another one of their infamous reviews. This time they tackle the video iPod and give it a proper review, complete with vivisection and a discussion of the guts." From the article: "It wouldn't be an Ars iPod review without a dissection (or in this case, a vivisection since the patient survived) and discussion. Talking about what changes were made on the exterior of the device is fine and well, but the real interesting stuff--to me anyways--is found within. As the old adage says, 'it's what's on the inside that counts.' With that, I'm dismantling this iPod in the name of science. All went well: I was able to put to back together and it's working fine." An interesting counter-point to previous coverage.
a vivisection since the patient survived
Vivisection means you cut on a living animal. Not that it survived the process.
Just sayin.
Actually, dissect is a synonym for "analyze," which in this case is appropriate; however, when we say dissect, we usually wish to evoke images of tissue and high school biology. The definition of dissect has no reference to anything dying. Vivisect, on the other hand, means "to cut a body open while still alive," which means that it has to be alive in the first place. Given that the video iPod was "dead" for a part of the procedure (can't run it while it isn't connected to battery, for example), dissect may be more appropriate. However, given that this is a gadget and not a living being, I would have chosen "disassembles" or "takes apart." Vivisect just sounds cool, though. That said, was anything learned that wasn't in apple's literature? Have we now any enjoyable hacks for the video iPod?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Your browser should ignore the file extension and instead look at the content-type header.
/reviews/hardware/video-ipod.ars HTTP/1.0
A la :
cmd> GET
cmd> Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
cmd> User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; DigExt)
cmd> Host: arstechnica.com
hdr> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
hdr> Connection: close
hdr> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:00:44 GMT
hdr> Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
hdr> MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
hdr> X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
hdr> X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
hdr> Cache-Control: private
hdr> Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
hdr> Content-Length: 16964
http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review3298.html
These guys actually posted their last night, worth a read too.
..... is the this Vivisection of an iPod complete with a cost breakdown of the components and an estimation of what Apple makes off of each iPod.
d f
https://jefferies.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/31086.p
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
it appears as if it is a ribbon cable or some sort, and should be easily replaced. At the very least, it's not soldered like the nano.
There are the iPod, iPod nano and iPod shuffle. It just so happens that the biggest ones also play video.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
It's just a fifth generation iPod with video. Video is not its primary function, if it was, then it'd be an iPod video. God damnit, people need to stop spreading misinformation on things.
The performance difference is significant (at least 10%, and often more), and it goes up with bigger files, like video
.ts file from a high-def 1080i capture), then I don't know, but I'd still think USB2 could handle that. You're still only talking a 19.8mb/sec streaming rate. My wireless internet connection can handle that without a hiccup, so a wired USB2 connection shouldn't have any problem with it. (USB2's theoretical transfer rate is 480mb/sec, although with overhead included, in reality it's much lower.)
You would think that a video iPod would be the place you would definitely want Firewire, at least as an option.
It would be nice to still have but you're making too big a deal out of it in this particular case.
The iPod's video files are native 320x240 mpeg-4 files. You can go up to something like 480x480, I guess, and if you compress them yourself you can make them relatively huge (not that you'd want to; it'd just be a waste of space), but the point is that in absolute terms, these are not large video files. You could easily stream them over USB2 with no hiccups whatsoever. You could probably stream a dozen of them at a time if the iPod supported such a thing.
But that's not the way the iPod works anyway. Now, I'm not 100% sure that the 5G iPod works the same as the 4G and previous models (I would assume it does), but you don't generally "stream" anything from the iPod to your PC. You *can*, depending on how you set up your sync preferences, but by default all of your iPod's contents will be greyed out because they're by definition just duplicated on the PC anyway. Probably 95% of iPod users have their systems set up this way, but the remaining 5% will have no trouble streaming video from the iPod over USB2.
Generally, though, the PC connection is just used for syncing. And you don't need to do that more than about once a week, unless you really collect huge amounts of music and movies on a daily basis. So you're not going to notice any speed difference between USB and Firewire there.
Now, if you just want to use the iPod as a mass-storage device for video (which you can also do), and store really high-res, high-def stuff on it (like a full-res
What Firewire is primarily used for in terms of video is uncompressed, full-res professional stuff. We use it where I work, for example, to store media on portable drives for transport. That's where the advantages of Firewire really make themselves apparent; USB2 never really gets near its theoretical speed limit and it'll hiccup more and more as you get closer to it, but Firewire stays nice and smooth right up to around 400mbps (assuming you're using Firewire 400, which is what older iPods supported).
But I can't see that anyone who uses the iPod as designed is going to have any problems with video. And nobody who really needs Firewire for video is going to be using an iPod in that capacity anyway; that video would be too important (and probably too big) to transport with anything but an industrial-strength full-size portable hard drive.
I'm glad I have a Firewire-capable 4G iPod only because I can use the included firewire cable and charger that came with my iPod without having to rely on my PC if I don't need to sync. But I could live without it if I didn't have it, and the video on the new iPod's really got no relevance to the issue.
Now that I've finally been able to RTFA, I see that you are correct. Removable battery. (Really small too... they must have ramped up power efficiency a few ways to get the extended life of this iPod.) Good news.
Biggest bummer: They dropped FireWire support entirely. It's USB2 only. Probably to save space and power, not to mention money.
Most important (to me) good news: It's the exact same width, so if I do end up buying one for some reason, it will fit in the same car-cradle as my current 3rd Gen model, with a tiny bit of padding to make up for lack of thickness. Needing to buy new accessories after moving up an iPod generatin or two is always a real buzz-kill.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Except that most people are still getting 320x240 from their cable/satellite receiver over *coax* and don't seem to complain. As the reviewer mentioned, videophiles (like, evidentally, yourself) probably won't be satisfied, but for your average joe (like me), who likely doesn't even know what a composite cable is, it's probably sufficient.
Discounting HDTV, the "Widescreen" DVD's are still technically formatted at a 4:3 aspect ratio on the disc. The only difference is that video is "squished" down from the 16:9 widescreen ratio. Video material that is flagged as widescreen and sent to a widescreen TV will be "unsquished" by the TV and stretched back out to fill the screen without black bars. On a standard aspect tv, the playback device must do this unsquishing itself and add the black bars to bring it back to a 4:3 ratio. The purpose of this setting in the iPod is probably the same as it is in a DVD player -- to tell it whether it should pass the video and flag is is (Widescreen = yes), or unsquish, add the black bars, and strip the flag (Widescreen = no). On programming that already is the standard 4:3 ratio this will make no difference.