Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Video iPod?
On this Slashdot thread that notes the new version of iTunes lets you download and watch music videos, there is a comment from someone claiming to be from Apple giving a lecture about why a video iPod would not work.
His main points were that people haven't flocked to existing portable movie players. Kids aren't even using the PSP (Sony's attempt to refight the game gear vs. gameboy battle) to play movies.
But here's the thing, a video out port on an iPod would only cost a few dollars extra to add to the device. Or they could make it part of the dock. Imagine 60GB of movies (presumably ~600MB MPEG-4 movies, so about 100 on a 60GB iPod) that you can take over to a friend's place to watch on his TV. The thing is smaller than even a single DVD.
Now, of course everyone knows Apple doesn't talk about unreleased hardware and I have no doubt one of them has thought of this before I have, so seeing the software infrastructure put in place now with iTunes makes me think that they aren't going to have someone else get this right first.
And if the idea does fail, it won't cost them anything substantial, since video technology has been part of QuickTime for over a decade and a half, and an iPod Photo already has everything it needs to play videos (digital out would be much better, of course.)
It's not about watching the movies on the little screen, the screen could even be turned off to save battry power. It's about the world's smallest TiVo.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod
> everything it needs to play videos
From what I've read, the above isn't really true:
- The iPod Photo doesn't have the necessary power to decode video on-the-fly.
- The drives used in the iPod Photo aren't geared toward this purpose, and would die a quick death if they had to incur this kind of usage (someone in the Slashdot thread you point to mentioned a 'matter of hours'). I believe Apple has recommended that people not use their iPods as boot disks for this reason.
: 10:04 p.m., May 13, 2005
