[yoyoman]

wow http://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/sw.mov

Impressive.

[sworthy]

whoa! I'm surprised that worked as a lot of people say that the ipod doesn't have enough processor ability to play videos. I wonder how long the battery life is

[Nodnarb]

Does anyone else think this is a fake? It doesn't look too real to me.

[fisherKing]

well,
a quicktime mov is just a bunch of frames playing sequentially...
so it's believable.

wouldn't be much fun to watch a movie scrolling the wheel like that, but...
shareware people! let's get on this now...

[MaxPower2k3]

link to the article next time



It's an engadget How-to about splitting up quicktime movies into individual frames (that star wars trailer made like 1620 images) and then exporting the audio. to do that, they exported the audio, played it on their ipod, and then quickly switched to the photos and scrolled through them quickly with their thumb in sync to the audio. Hardly real video playback, but i guess some people might be interested...


http://www.engadget.com/entry/3756421320807387/

[maxintosh]

Wow, it's surprisingly smooth. I mean it would be ridiculous to actually watch movies like that, but I think the iPod theoretically could playback videos if Apple added the capability to the software.

[dotmike]

It'd be even better if he'd turned the clicker off!

Notice how the demo movie stops when Obi-Wan's background narration finishes and things with sound effects start happening. The difficulty of synching sound to the right frames could be amusing!

(Real movies used to be like this in the old days, when the sound became out of sync with what was projected.)

[brapper]

the iPod processor is indeed able to handle motion jpegs, otherwise known as mpegs..
find your own link, I'm sleepy.

[mrchin]

Possibly just setting up the slideshow settings manually to scroll through without delay and if one could adjust it to change photos at 29.97 frames per second, that'd work. Just need to have it start with the audio track.

How? Don't ask me.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by brapper:
the iPod processor is indeed able to handle motion jpegs, otherwise known as mpegs..
find your own link, I'm sleepy.

I don't think so. Prove me wrong !

Just because the iPod can play pictures in rapid succession, it doesn't automatically mean it would be able to play a movie with synchronized sound.

-t

[Evan_11]

Originally posted by turtle777:
I don't think so. Prove me wrong !

Just because the iPod can play pictures in rapid succession, it doesn't automatically mean it would be able to play a movie with synchronized sound.

-t

We had this convo over in the Lounge. I'm sure that it's perfectly capable with some minor tweaks. Apple could even add an export option to iMovie for iPod video. It doesn't have to be super quality.

I think there is a market for video on the iPod. I know that someone just introduced a device that plugs into the back of your TiVo that streams compressed video for viewing on cellphones.

For music I see the future being flash based. The only time I really use my iPod is for when I bike or excercise and for that I want something even smaller and lighter than a mini. Wireless would be even better.

[yoyoman]

can you say mpeg4 part 10?

[michaelb]

The iPod Photo uses the Portal Player PP5020 chip, which features:

(Bolded items are features that Apple is currently not using.)

- integrated USB 2.0 and FireWire (Link Layer) controllers,
- real-time decoding of MP3, AAC and ACELP.NET
- real-time decoding of WMA
- high-speed MP3 and ACELP.NET encoding
- real-time decoding of JPEG
- real-time decoding of MJPEG
- TV-Out (8-bit digital video output to external NTSC/PAL encoder)
- S/P-DIF interface

MJPEG stands for Motion-JPEG and was the codec most commonly used when video capturing for real-time editing on a computer was done through a capture card (rather than a DV stream as now). MJPEG-A and MJPEG-B are both QuickTime codecs.

So, Apple could have made the iPod Photo do video now, with very little work. iMovie could have been the conduit for videos, just like iPhoto is for photos.

But the time is apparently not right, in a marketing sense.

[RonnieoftheRose]

Originally posted by michaelb:
The iPod Photo uses the Portal Player PP5020 chip, which features:

(Bolded items are features that Apple is currently not using.)

- integrated USB 2.0 and FireWire (Link Layer) controllers,
- real-time decoding of MP3, AAC and ACELP.NET
- real-time decoding of WMA
- high-speed MP3 and ACELP.NET encoding
- real-time decoding of JPEG
- real-time decoding of MJPEG
- TV-Out (8-bit digital video output to external NTSC/PAL encoder)
- S/P-DIF interface

If that's true a third party could develop something.

[macaddict0001]

It should be possible to use imovie instead of quicktime pro...

[Grrr]

Must admit, from everything I have read here, it does seem like it is perfectly possible.
However, I can't say i'd want to watch anything of much significance on the tiny screen. It would really bug me after 10 minutes. However, it certainly would be cool if movies could be piped out of the AV socket, making the iPod a portable video player of sorts that you can plug into TV's and what not.
A bit frustrating really, as clearly all the required technology to do that is there..
On the other hand, it would require pretty much constant HD access which would nuke the battery in no time.

[GORDYmac]

Originally posted by brapper:
the iPod processor is indeed able to handle motion jpegs, otherwise known as mpegs...

This is off topic, but, actually, they aren't the same. Two different acronyms/technologies:

Motion-JPEG: JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, a standard for storing and compressing digital images. Motion-JPEG extends this standard by supporting videos. In motion-JPEG, each frame in the video is stored with the JPEG format--much like the engadget demo.

MPEG: An audio/visual compression standard designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group for devices that can read or write about 1.5 Mbits/second worth of data. Indivual frames look crappy due to this compression. In contrast, MPEGs are significantly smaller than Motion JPEGs.

[michaelb]

Originally posted by GORDYmac:
This is off topic, but, actually, they aren't the same. Two different acronyms/technologies:

Motion-JPEG: JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, a standard for storing and compressing digital images. Motion-JPEG extends this standard by supporting videos. In motion-JPEG, each frame in the video is stored with the JPEG format--much like the engadget demo.

MPEG: An audio/visual compression standard designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group for devices that can read or write about 1.5 Mbits/second worth of data. Indivual frames look crappy due to this compression. In contrast, MPEGs are significantly smaller than Motion JPEGs.

Thanks Gordy, that's a good description.

And Motion JPEG has traditionally been used for capturing, whereas as MPEG-1, 2, and 4 have been used for playback. (There was no MPEG-3 because they just knew that people would confuse "MP3" and "MPEG-3" just like this!)

QuickTime makes it clear by actually spelling it out in its codec lists.



Presumably, that's what we'd export to if the iPod Photo did support video playback, but even though I have one, I'm not going to try putting one on, because I'm 99.99999% sure it wouldn't work!

Probably Motion JPEG's inclusion in the Portal Player chip capabilities has more to do with the fact that it's similar to JPEG and easier to decode in terms of processing power, rather than being intended for use right now to make video iPods. For these, Apple will probably need to include an additional chip to decode MPEG-4 or DivX or Sorenson or H.264.

My money's on the last one, because (a) it is a key part of Tiger, (b) it has the alternative name "Advanced Video Coding" (AVC) which goes well with "Advanced Audio Coding" (AAC), and (c) Microsoft don't like it and it will make it incompatible with their stuff!