Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Apple iPod Video Player

Today Apple announced a new iPod that is also a video player. This was not unexpected, but in many ways limited. You can't easily rip a DVD and put the content on the machine or move shows from a DVR like ReplayTV which has second party software like DVArchive that makes the process pretty easy. However, I have to watch the content on my laptop, computer, or stream it back to a Replay.

MadSkeelz on the AVSforum outlines the process like this:

"Well, you need to suck out the ReplayTV MPEG and get it into your computer. Assuming you have a RTV 4000 or better, just use DVArchive.

Then, you need to transcode the video file. You can use a free tool like ffmpeg, or a not-free tool, like FlipFactory, PopWire, Cleaner, Compressor, and prolly a bunch of others. But, this really will take a long time. [Hours, not minutes.]

Once the movie has been converted, just drop it into iTunes and sync your iPod.

Using DVArchive, you could probably automate this pretty well. DVArchive can be scheduled to automatically suck video down at a given time from the RTV to your computer. Then, you could have your transcoding application watch DVArchive's downloads folder. Anytime it sees a new file, it can act on it, converting it and dumping it to a destination you specify. Then, just have the output dropped into iTunes.

Doing this the first time will be a lot of trial/error and a big time-suck. But once you figure out the workflow that works best for you, you'll be all set."


No way I'll be doing that. I'll stick to my old iPod and my laptop with VideoLanClient. That said, Apple is experimenting with some interesting new ways of distributing content. $1.99 for a show is probably too steep in such a tiny format...but I *might* go for $99 like songs. But see, with music I listen over and over and over again. With a TV show, I'll watch it once. If its outstanding perhaps three times, but never like I listen to music.

Still, I think that this is a cool product which will sell well.


Comments:
You could also use the new free Videora iPod Converter to transcode the video.

Check it out here:
Videora iPod Converter
 
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