Video on Notes

webcast app

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:06:17 +0000

I saw the Oct 12 webcast (the URL will go away soon, I supose) some days ago, but only today I got some time to post it. Of course the news of the day is the new Aperture software (and not being a photographer like João Pedro, Rui or Delfim, I can’t value it properly), and the new hardware, powermacs and powerbooks. I’ll write some comments about the last ones later.

Regarding the Oct 12, these where my notes:

Photoboth: fun app! I liked the detail that the screen goes totally blank when the shutter fires to serve as a flash. It’s the small details, I tell you;
Frontrow: the iMac’s have and external s-video output. Can you use it with Frontrow? That would allow us to use Frontrow with a normal TV set;
I liked the U2 iPod ad, nicely done;
iTMS: the “Just for you” section is an obvious improvement to any online retail store, nowadays. What I found interesting is that the “I already own this” and the “not interested” features are much more visible than the Amazon.co.uk, my usual online retailer. I was telling Rui that it was surprised that Amazon didn’t had this feature first and it was he who pointed out that they had it, in fact. I found it, in light grey on the recommendations page, not very visible to me. Yet, on either of them, I still can ask for stuff that I want but isn’t available on their store;
the presentation: like previous editions, everything just works. The last time something went wrong that I remembered was the Tiger preview, two years ago in in June, me thinks, when one of the computers Jobs was using started to act up and he switched to a backup. The live iPod demo where nice, also. One question I had at the time, when doing the iPod demos, there was a white border on screen: does it appear in the TV when you are using Video-out? If it does, does it appear in black with the black iPods? :)
TV shows: bah, not available outside the US yet. What about subtitles? Even the english for the hearing impaired track would be nice;
Jobs: he seemed tired, more than usual. He made at least some mistakes, calling iMac to the iPod at least on two occasions;
The bit I liked the most to hear: almost at the end, when Robert Iger, the Disney CEO, was talking (around 58:50): on the subject of digital distributions - “‘it is the future as far as we are concern”’

Overall nice event. I don’t plan to buy a Video iPod, but I think it’s good enough for a first version and it helps kick-start the download video market.

The iMac looks very nice, and if people ask me for a desktop computer to the home, I’ll probably recommend it. The price is good, great value.

I'm off to bed now

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:04:56 +0000

I was waiting for Oct 12 to see if my current laptop would get a decent facelift. It’s not he is no longer sexy, it just that I’m no longer as patient as I once was, and waiting for some functions is getting to be a drag.

So when I saw that we only get TV shows in the US (as in not available anywhere else for now, nor any idea about when that might change), an iPod with a bigger screen and video decoding but resolutions that will not cut it for video out, and a desktop computer that is nice but still a desktop computer… well… it’s all pretty and nice, but that’s it.

Yes, the video store is a beginning of something, I’m sure. $2 a pop per episode is more or less the same that I pay when I get the DVD packs from Amazon. The advantage is that the episode is available the next day, and DVD series usually trail the season at least a year.

Since the first aluminum powerbooks, we haven’t had any decent upgrades to the high-end Apple laptop line, so right now, unless you really need one, there is no point in buying one: the ibooks are much better bang for buck. I still have my 15” powerbook because of screen real-estate, that’s it.

So, until Apple does something good with powerbooks, I just don’t care anymore. In case you are wondering, yes, I would buy a dual-core G4 powerbook right now, even knowing that the intel-based ones will be around probably christmas next year…

I’ll peek the January Apple Expo without much hope, but frankly, wake me up next year.

Video iPod

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 18:04:35 +0000

I was listening to an old archive of Your Mac Life, the Mac-oriented radio show (check it out, it’s good). The show was the July 29, and the segment that got me thinking was the Chris Breen of Macworld. He’s a iPod-expert, and was there to talk about the 4th generation iPod.

He said that the iPod menu in the 4G has a ‘Music’ item (i assume it replaces the old ‘Browse’ item), and goes on to speculate what will they do next. It surely points to other type of media been supported in the iPod in the near future.

I don’t share the view that the iPod should be able to play video on the screen that it has. A lot of value of the iPod is about its form factor, and getting a display good enough to show movies would probably ruin that.

Chris says that you could probably see photos (iPhoto sync) and that’s also likely but displaying them is still a problem.

So what about this: make a cable that plugs into the Firewire port (with a bit of logic or active components) and outputs S-Video and Audio output. Then you can put DVDs, H.264 encoded movies with some sort of FairView DRM that Apple builds, or even your iPhoto slideshows.

You only need to port the DVD player to the iPod, put all the decoding there, including DeCSS stuff.

This would be a killer feature for those 40Gb and (we assume) 60Gb models coming out sometime this year. I could go into DVD Player, and say “Sync to iPod”, or even, “Compress (H.264) and Sync to iPod”, get to a Hotel somewhere, plug my iPod into the room TV set and watch the movie.

I think some hollywood people would need convincing, but Apple had some success with the music industry, so why not the hollywood industry. Steve Jobs has a feet in both worlds in this case.

We’ll see.