The two competing HD formats are 50 gigs and 30 gigs. Considering DVDs hold about 8.5, that'd be either 3 to 5 discs. I don't think ANYONE would want to change discs five times during a movie!
You wouldn't NEED to change discs. When the discs arrive, you'd COPY the data from the DVD-Rs onto a hard drive, where it'd be combined into one piece during the installation.
It's really not that complicated of an idea. If you're putting the movies on a computer for playing, they don't have to fit on one DVD, and no disc swapping would be required.
I don't think the movies would be that big, either, because they'd be compressed using H.264, not raw HD video. It'd be more like two DVD-R discs.
A full feature will come down to about 7 GB, but that's an average. You can't boil that down to bits-per-second.
My point was that there are smaller units of video that could be purchased, and to get a rough estimate of how big they'd be.
Not everything you'd want to download as video is a 2 hour movie.
If people want to discuss the bandwidth requirements of an Apple video store, it would be better to start small (music videos, shorts, half-hour sitcoms, and hour dramas) than to start with the bandwidth requirements of a full 2 hour movie.
A 2 hour movie may be infeasible at this time, but there's a crapload of Simpsons, M.A.S.H., Aardman animated shorts, Dr. Who, Blackadder, and other shows that could make up the offerings of an iTunes store.
Um. None. I don't know, you know, how much television you watch, but credits are not stills. They move.
Thanks, brainiac, that's why I said "converting them to still frames". Perhaps I ought to have said, "converting them to a non-moving representation".
For many shows, there's no particular reason why credits need to be shown as moving. The information could be conveyed just as easily if copied to a series of still frames. That would save a large number of bytes.
Some shows actually do things during the credits. This scheme would not work for such shows. Simpsons fans might get upset if you take away the opening sequence.
But for the most part, there's no good reason why it's necessary for the Key Grip's name to scroll up the screen over the course of several dozen frames of video. Putting up a still frame, without the scrolling, would serve just as well and would save lots of bandwidth.
The only reason for the scrolling is to keep the name on screen long enough for it to be intelligible. That makes sense in a theater, or with a broadcast program, where there's a lot of information to get across, the amount of information that can be put on-screen at once is limited, and time is limited by an inflexible program schedule.
But if you're watching a recording on your computer, these restrictions don't exist. You have complete control. There is no reason to stick with the scrolling credits if you can replace them with a series of still images of non-scrolling credits that stay on screen for an arbitrary length of time, probably without increasing the size of the movie.
Nowhere is it written as an immutable law of nature that credits must move. Apple could work with studios to take advantage of this where possible and save some bandwidth.
Some flexibility exists with how the credits are stored, because people often don't even watch them. Better to make save space there, than to lower the quality of the entire video.
It'd work at delivering movies, but that'd hardly be HD format though.
It would be HD. No reason you can't store an HD video in a QuickTime file, or store it on a DVD-R.
How do you think HD home videos, made with iMovie, are going to be sent around to friends and relatives?
And if that is Apple's plan, I don't see the point, because as you point out, Netflix is already doing it. And with Netflix, you don't need a $500 computer, you can use a $30 DVD player from Wallmart.
If an HD movie won't fit onto a DVD, it would fit onto two. That would prevent it from being used on a DVD player, but the contents of the two DVDs could be merged into a single movie on a hard disk.
So an episode of The Simpsons (25 minutes) would be about 1.4GB, but could actually be less because HD would probably be overkill, and who knows, maybe it'd compress well.
An episode of Buffy (44 minutes) would be about 2.5 GB.
How much could be saved by clipping the opening/closing credits (where possible) and converting them to still frames rather than video? For a 24/25 minute sitcom, that might be worthwhile.
Consider a QuickTime Video Store, where the "CDs" are actually things like "The Simpsons: Season One".
The tracks would be episodes. Instead of downloading a 2-hour movie, you'd be downloading a 24 minute episode.
If you had the patience and a good connection, you might go for an episode of a 1-hour show, or, what, 48 minutes of video?.
There's a whole lot of old TV that could be sold that way online. And new TV, too. It'd be a coup if Apple convinced someone to put new shows up on there immediately after the first broadcast.
Full-length movies could be sold as DRM'd Quicktime-format movies on data DVDs, mailed to the buyer and copied onto the hard disk. (The DVD wouldn't work in a DVD player, however.)
As bandwidth rises, longer videos could be downloaded online.
"DVD movies are around 4 gigs each, ignoring all the bonus material. Even if the HD content somehow stays the same size, it'd still take days to download the movie you wanted."
How about a NetFlix-y mail-ordering system, except you get a data DVD with the movie as a QuickTime file (DRM'd of course).
I think they'll give QuickTime an iTunes-like interface, with a library and sharing, and they'll use it for a QuickTime Movie Store. That way they won't clutter up iTunes' interface and turn it into Windows Media Player.
Using the QuickTime name would get QuickTime lots of free press, and bolster their format against Real and Windows Media, and encourage media outlets to switch to QuickTime streams. It might also help promote Apple's video editing software, and the use of Macs for video editing.
Using QuickTime.app instead of rolling it into iTunes would also let Apple chalk up another, distinct success, in addition to iTunes and the iPod. If a movie store is as big of a success as iTunes Music Store has been, it would be better if it were counted separately and not blurred into one big iTunes success.
(When you're at 2% marketshare, you need all the wins you can get. Separating the movie store would give Apple three wins, instead of just two.)
You already need QuickTime to use iTunes, so they wouldn't have to worry about people not having the program. They'd just slip it a QuickTime update with an iTunes update, like they already do.
Moving people from one app to the other would be simple enough. There could be special links, like those to the iTunes store, which cause QuickTime to open up. Those could be used to scoot users from a page in the iTunes store to QuickTime's store. Doing this, it wouldn't take long to introduce enough people for a QTMovieStore to reach the tipping point of word-of-mouth.
It would be easy to put add movies to iTunes, but I don't think that would be the best move strategically.
Is that most games don't encompass enough to function as more than a sidebar to a chapter. Or even a subchapter.
Strategy games might teach ancient history students that the Romans faced peoples named the Vandals, Goths, Allemanni, etc. But the games probably wouldn't teach much *about* these people.
They'd learn more by reading Tacitus' Germania which isn't very long at all.
There's a place for games, but it's primarily one of emphasizing and illustrating specific points. In some cases, they might raise students' interest. But they aren't good for conveying the density of information that text is good at.
To explain my 'joke', one of the definitions of 'tattoo' is " b : outdoor military exercise given by troops as evening entertainment"
One of the better known is the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which involves lots of people in kilts, playing bagpipes.
Hence, the hackers in kilts.
(Alas, I got this mixed up with the Highland Games, which is why I mentioned the 'cable toss', a pun on the traditional 'caber toss' competition of throwing something that looks like a wooden telephone pole.)
The Hungary bit was mentioned because an international event involving obfuscated C code should surely be held in Hungary, in honor of Hungarian notation, which obfuscates code intended for maintenance.
My Karma should now be "Negative: needed to explain own joke"
Just having a little fun with national stereotypes. At least I didn't say her teeth were going to start jutting out at all angles and falling out.
Actually, about 6 years ago I met a woman from Russia, who was doing graduate work in biology in Chicago. She was really skinny, and for some reason it came up that she found American food to be awful and tasteless, compared to the food she had back home in Moscow.
I can certainly believe that. Fruit and vegetables are being bred by Agribiz giants for shelf life, rather than flavor. Tuna is treated with carbon monoxide to make it redder, making it look fresher and more attractive to the buyer.
And now the cutting edge in American cuisine seems to be burgers the size of a small child.
Composite-in would be useful for people who have old VHS videotapes, and want to put them on their Mac.
Some may not have a camera, let alone a DV one. I could see someone new to the Mac and video editing wanting to make an iMovie of, say, an old wedding video, as a trial run, before going out to spend the money on a video camera.
It'd be handy if that could be done by just hooking up a VCR, without spending $100 or more on a USB-in. But I'm not sure how many customers would potentially fit this profile.
They're selling their cameras as closed, black box appliances. As a result, they're free to change the products' innards whenever they like, as often as they like, as long as the outward functionality remains the same.
If they opened up more with information, people would use the information (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the camera manufacturer would probably end up having less freedom to change the product at will.
It would not be to their advantage to get locked into a particular hardware or software configuration, when some third party product, which relies on a particular design, gets popular.
If people want a grownup gaming magazine, then perhaps a magazine is needed which is characterized by what has long been considered to identify a book as being "for grownups".
No pictures.
Then it'd have to survive on the quality of the writing, and the thoughts expressed. The lack of screenshots would encourage a focus on deeper issues than graphics of scary monsters and explosions.
The lack of pictures would let it function on a lower budget, removing the need to whore for the vendors and the kiddies looking for pictures of CGI chicks who make them feel kinda funny down there.
Start it out as a low-budget zine, and build credibility. If interest rises high enough, move to a more traditional printed journal format with higher production values. Maybe even allow line drawing diagrams, when necessary.
(Note: I am not a person who thinks a book with pictures is automatically a kids' book. Graphic Novel readers need not respond with examples of Maus or Persepolis, etc)
VS.NET will need more memory, everything will run slower, projects will have problems when the new XML stuff has a bug.
A full build of Windows will take a week.
And, for all that, they'll get the benefit of... Well, if they ever happen to need to convert to a different language, they might be able to.
(Really, it's a bit like towing a giant boat behind your car all the time, because you just might have a chance to use it. Except you live in southern Libya. In the desert.)
Meanwhile, Mac developers, unburdened by this stuff, will tear ahead.
Yes, I think this is the wave of the future. Microsoft should jump on it.
Slashdot Mirror
"That is just WAY to complicated of a system. Isn't Apple's mantra simplicity?"
You can't handle installing something that comes on more than one disc?
The two competing HD formats are 50 gigs and 30 gigs. Considering DVDs hold about 8.5, that'd be either 3 to 5 discs. I don't think ANYONE would want to change discs five times during a movie!
You wouldn't NEED to change discs. When the discs arrive, you'd COPY the data from the DVD-Rs onto a hard drive, where it'd be combined into one piece during the installation.
It's really not that complicated of an idea. If you're putting the movies on a computer for playing, they don't have to fit on one DVD, and no disc swapping would be required.
I don't think the movies would be that big, either, because they'd be compressed using H.264, not raw HD video. It'd be more like two DVD-R discs.
A full feature will come down to about 7 GB, but that's an average. You can't boil that down to bits-per-second.
My point was that there are smaller units of video that could be purchased, and to get a rough estimate of how big they'd be.
Not everything you'd want to download as video is a 2 hour movie.
If people want to discuss the bandwidth requirements of an Apple video store, it would be better to start small (music videos, shorts, half-hour sitcoms, and hour dramas) than to start with the bandwidth requirements of a full 2 hour movie.
A 2 hour movie may be infeasible at this time, but there's a crapload of Simpsons, M.A.S.H., Aardman animated shorts, Dr. Who, Blackadder, and other shows that could make up the offerings of an iTunes store.
Um. None. I don't know, you know, how much television you watch, but credits are not stills. They move.
Thanks, brainiac, that's why I said "converting them to still frames". Perhaps I ought to have said, "converting them to a non-moving representation".
For many shows, there's no particular reason why credits need to be shown as moving. The information could be conveyed just as easily if copied to a series of still frames. That would save a large number of bytes.
Some shows actually do things during the credits. This scheme would not work for such shows. Simpsons fans might get upset if you take away the opening sequence.
But for the most part, there's no good reason why it's necessary for the Key Grip's name to scroll up the screen over the course of several dozen frames of video. Putting up a still frame, without the scrolling, would serve just as well and would save lots of bandwidth.
The only reason for the scrolling is to keep the name on screen long enough for it to be intelligible. That makes sense in a theater, or with a broadcast program, where there's a lot of information to get across, the amount of information that can be put on-screen at once is limited, and time is limited by an inflexible program schedule.
But if you're watching a recording on your computer, these restrictions don't exist. You have complete control. There is no reason to stick with the scrolling credits if you can replace them with a series of still images of non-scrolling credits that stay on screen for an arbitrary length of time, probably without increasing the size of the movie.
Nowhere is it written as an immutable law of nature that credits must move. Apple could work with studios to take advantage of this where possible and save some bandwidth.
Some flexibility exists with how the credits are stored, because people often don't even watch them. Better to make save space there, than to lower the quality of the entire video.
It'd work at delivering movies, but that'd hardly be HD format though.
It would be HD. No reason you can't store an HD video in a QuickTime file, or store it on a DVD-R.
How do you think HD home videos, made with iMovie, are going to be sent around to friends and relatives?
And if that is Apple's plan, I don't see the point, because as you point out, Netflix is already doing it. And with Netflix, you don't need a $500 computer, you can use a $30 DVD player from Wallmart.
If an HD movie won't fit onto a DVD, it would fit onto two. That would prevent it from being used on a DVD player, but the contents of the two DVDs could be merged into a single movie on a hard disk.
"Anyway Jobs doesn't seem too interested in television. Music?, movies? yes! TV? not so much."
This is true. But perhaps HD has him thinking, "Hm. Now we could do something for TV that doesn't suck."
So an episode of The Simpsons (25 minutes) would be about 1.4GB, but could actually be less because HD would probably be overkill, and who knows, maybe it'd compress well.
An episode of Buffy (44 minutes) would be about 2.5 GB.
How much could be saved by clipping the opening/closing credits (where possible) and converting them to still frames rather than video? For a 24/25 minute sitcom, that might be worthwhile.
Consider a QuickTime Video Store, where the "CDs" are actually things like "The Simpsons: Season One".
The tracks would be episodes. Instead of downloading a 2-hour movie, you'd be downloading a 24 minute episode.
If you had the patience and a good connection, you might go for an episode of a 1-hour show, or, what, 48 minutes of video?.
There's a whole lot of old TV that could be sold that way online. And new TV, too. It'd be a coup if Apple convinced someone to put new shows up on there immediately after the first broadcast.
Full-length movies could be sold as DRM'd Quicktime-format movies on data DVDs, mailed to the buyer and copied onto the hard disk. (The DVD wouldn't work in a DVD player, however.)
As bandwidth rises, longer videos could be downloaded online.
"DVD movies are around 4 gigs each, ignoring all the bonus material. Even if the HD content somehow stays the same size, it'd still take days to download the movie you wanted."
How about a NetFlix-y mail-ordering system, except you get a data DVD with the movie as a QuickTime file (DRM'd of course).
I think they'll give QuickTime an iTunes-like interface, with a library and sharing, and they'll use it for a QuickTime Movie Store. That way they won't clutter up iTunes' interface and turn it into Windows Media Player.
Using the QuickTime name would get QuickTime lots of free press, and bolster their format against Real and Windows Media, and encourage media outlets to switch to QuickTime streams. It might also help promote Apple's video editing software, and the use of Macs for video editing.
Using QuickTime.app instead of rolling it into iTunes would also let Apple chalk up another, distinct success, in addition to iTunes and the iPod. If a movie store is as big of a success as iTunes Music Store has been, it would be better if it were counted separately and not blurred into one big iTunes success.
(When you're at 2% marketshare, you need all the wins you can get. Separating the movie store would give Apple three wins, instead of just two.)
You already need QuickTime to use iTunes, so they wouldn't have to worry about people not having the program. They'd just slip it a QuickTime update with an iTunes update, like they already do.
Moving people from one app to the other would be simple enough. There could be special links, like those to the iTunes store, which cause QuickTime to open up. Those could be used to scoot users from a page in the iTunes store to QuickTime's store. Doing this, it wouldn't take long to introduce enough people for a QTMovieStore to reach the tipping point of word-of-mouth.
It would be easy to put add movies to iTunes, but I don't think that would be the best move strategically.
They'll have to do a second version with the video and audio stuff built-in.
You could make it work with external interfaces, as many suggest, but it would fail in the marketplace. The extra mess of cords alone would kill it.
It has to be one piece.
"The modulus of elasticity is high, and because of the shape of the objects they can only contact at one point."
Also, their shape probably reduces the contact with the supporting surface, which prevents the ringing from being damped out.
Gaiman says Zemeckis wants to do it with motion capture, like he did Polar Express.
Me, I think they could save a lot of money by just doing stop-motion with some plastic action figures of the characters.
It'd look just as realistic as Polar Express did...
Is that most games don't encompass enough to function as more than a sidebar to a chapter. Or even a subchapter.
Strategy games might teach ancient history students that the Romans faced peoples named the Vandals, Goths, Allemanni, etc. But the games probably wouldn't teach much *about* these people.
They'd learn more by reading Tacitus' Germania which isn't very long at all.
There's a place for games, but it's primarily one of emphasizing and illustrating specific points. In some cases, they might raise students' interest. But they aren't good for conveying the density of information that text is good at.
To explain my 'joke', one of the definitions of 'tattoo' is " b : outdoor military exercise given by troops as evening entertainment"
One of the better known is the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which involves lots of people in kilts, playing bagpipes.
Hence, the hackers in kilts.
(Alas, I got this mixed up with the Highland Games, which is why I mentioned the 'cable toss', a pun on the traditional 'caber toss' competition of throwing something that looks like a wooden telephone pole.)
The Hungary bit was mentioned because an international event involving obfuscated C code should surely be held in Hungary, in honor of Hungarian notation, which obfuscates code intended for maintenance.
My Karma should now be "Negative: needed to explain own joke"
"International Obfuscated C Code Tattoo."
Sounds like a gathering of confusing hackers in kilts.
I expect it would be held in Hungary, and would involve events like the cable toss.
I hear your next-door neighbor just picked up a lot of 480,000 super-high-gauss electromagnets, from the old Superconducting Supercollider project.
You might want to put up some shielding.
The main problem with LCDs is likely to be the backlight CCFLs.
Those are replaceable, though you need some solder-fu to do so, and you need to be comfortable handling 5mm thick fluorescent tubes.
The tubes are pretty cheap, too. $20 or less, usually.
Just having a little fun with national stereotypes. At least I didn't say her teeth were going to start jutting out at all angles and falling out.
Actually, about 6 years ago I met a woman from Russia, who was doing graduate work in biology in Chicago. She was really skinny, and for some reason it came up that she found American food to be awful and tasteless, compared to the food she had back home in Moscow.
I can certainly believe that. Fruit and vegetables are being bred by Agribiz giants for shelf life, rather than flavor. Tuna is treated with carbon monoxide to make it redder, making it look fresher and more attractive to the buyer.
And now the cutting edge in American cuisine seems to be burgers the size of a small child.
That's what's going on.
She lives in London now, and has been there for a while.
Composite-in would be useful for people who have old VHS videotapes, and want to put them on their Mac.
Some may not have a camera, let alone a DV one. I could see someone new to the Mac and video editing wanting to make an iMovie of, say, an old wedding video, as a trial run, before going out to spend the money on a video camera.
It'd be handy if that could be done by just hooking up a VCR, without spending $100 or more on a USB-in. But I'm not sure how many customers would potentially fit this profile.
They're selling their cameras as closed, black box appliances. As a result, they're free to change the products' innards whenever they like, as often as they like, as long as the outward functionality remains the same.
If they opened up more with information, people would use the information (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the camera manufacturer would probably end up having less freedom to change the product at will.
It would not be to their advantage to get locked into a particular hardware or software configuration, when some third party product, which relies on a particular design, gets popular.
If people want a grownup gaming magazine, then perhaps a magazine is needed which is characterized by what has long been considered to identify a book as being "for grownups".
No pictures.
Then it'd have to survive on the quality of the writing, and the thoughts expressed. The lack of screenshots would encourage a focus on deeper issues than graphics of scary monsters and explosions.
The lack of pictures would let it function on a lower budget, removing the need to whore for the vendors and the kiddies looking for pictures of CGI chicks who make them feel kinda funny down there.
Start it out as a low-budget zine, and build credibility. If interest rises high enough, move to a more traditional printed journal format with higher production values. Maybe even allow line drawing diagrams, when necessary.
(Note: I am not a person who thinks a book with pictures is automatically a kids' book. Graphic Novel readers need not respond with examples of Maus or Persepolis, etc)
The guy who put the CEO's cellphone on the web has been sacked.
The CEO is not to be disturbed when he's cooking up Vegemite on the barbie.
Really. I think Visual Studio
VS.NET will need more memory, everything will run slower, projects will have problems when the new XML stuff has a bug.
A full build of Windows will take a week.
And, for all that, they'll get the benefit of... Well, if they ever happen to need to convert to a different language, they might be able to.
(Really, it's a bit like towing a giant boat behind your car all the time, because you just might have a chance to use it. Except you live in southern Libya. In the desert.)
Meanwhile, Mac developers, unburdened by this stuff, will tear ahead.
Yes, I think this is the wave of the future. Microsoft should jump on it.
Always a good time had by all.
Uh, except you, I guess.