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Don’t rush out to the Apple store

Fred Oliveira on October 13, 2005

iPod Video … Unless you’re going for the iMac, that is. Because the new iPod with video isn’t there. Believe me, I tried. Me and Mike (TechCrunch) read about the announcement and literally rushed out the door to the Apple store. That is, without really reading the part where they said “on sale next week”.

Good news is Apple did it. I am usually quite good with predictions but I don’t know how this one is going to play out in the videoblogging world. Still, I could say I’m excited (well, excited enough to rush out to shell off 400 bucks). Now, I’m not super excited with keeping the iPod layout - I’d love it if they had really gone video-centric and made the display horizontal and wide instead of just expanding it towards the borders.

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Jason Tucker

It’s very keen for the VidCast guys as this is more suited to small chunks of video, which is why TV works so well for it.

I’m still not going to call this the Video iPod but more of and iPod that has some video functions. I envision the video iPod if ever release would be 16:9 and be bit bigger, almost PSP sized.

But alas I am with you and shelled out 400 smackers at the online store. They are telling me the 21st will be the earliest.

Josh Jarmin

I agree. A true video iPod would need to be turned on its side, widescreen with a white border all the way around. It would get rid of the physical scroll wheel for some kind of touch screen type interface.

Even so, I am thinking of getting a new black 20GB iPod to replace my less than 1 year old Mini.

Fred

Josh: I wouldn’t touch screen on the iPod because if you force people to use their fingers on it, you’re basically forcing them to leave finger marks on it, which kind of gets in the way of the actual displaying the movies.

My Sony PSP *always* has annoying marks all over it just because of grabbing it; I wouldn’t like the iPod to behave the same way, so the scroll wheel would remain. That, or small buttons.

Declan

It’s a shame they didn’t include .avi support along with mpeg’s and mov’s.

Fred

Well, .avi (audio video interlaced) is just a container for an audio stream and a video stream and it is codec independent. So what you mean is support for xvid/divx. Mpeg 4 is available on the ipod, though, so you could actually use the same quality content.

The problem with videos for the ipod is actually the resolution. I wonder if the ipod does the scaling itself or the videos need to be resized as well as recompressed to play.

Ed

I have a similar question Fred. Can I plug this Ipod into my 62inch plasma screen and get full screen 16:9 movies on my screen or is the content compressed and resized for the Ipod screen format. Would be awesome if this were the case

eric Lin

make has done some testing with video blog feeds and they seem to import with no problem into iTunes 6. as long as the videos are encoded properly, they (and i) see no reason why this shouldn’t work with the new iPod as well. unfortunately my jaw dropped, and not in a good way, when i read video playback is rated at 2 hours for the 30 gb and 3 hours for the 60. my psp gets at lest 5 hours of video playback, and it has a bigger screen and replaceable batteries. don’t get me wrong, i think it’s a huge step forward, but it’s not there yet.

fred, divx doctor has a way to re-containerize your 3ivx movies into .mov to play on the iPod now.

ed, the video on the iPod is played back in 4:3 aspect and cannot be any larger than 320 px across. it would look like junk on your swanky 62″ HDTV

Gustavo Pimenta

I’m 100% with you on this Fred!

Apple adapted the iPod to a new function instead of rethinking the interface like they should have done.

vincent

This would have been much more interesting :
http://www.kub.fr/iPlay/iPlay.html

Something to say?