I'm not quite sure why this is the time to start writing in this blog again, but now is better than never...
I recently bought myself an iPod - close enough to perhaps be a birthday present to myself. After years of wanting one, but not quite feeling like it was necessary it seemed like the time. Apple finally put out a (video) iPod and I wanted to play too. I got the 60GB version in black.
All the regular iPod goodness is there of course, but the real question is the video thing. Right now I have to say that it isn't much more than a nice trick - a toy. I ride the train to work, almost exactly the right amount of time for a one hour TV show - at least after the commercials are removed. It's a perfect time to watch TV. I can't comfortably read very much on a moving train - it tends to make me ill - but watching TV or movies is OK. I also managed to get a gift certificate to the iTunes Music (and video) Store right around the time that I got the iPod. Although I've been using iTunes for years, paying for overly pre-compressed music doesn't appeal to me very much. I dutifully bought the two part opener for Lost. It did serve to get me hooked on the show, but it also proved to me that watching video on the iPod isn't worth it to me.
The (video) iPod LCD is good, but not as good as the one on my PSP, and definitely not as good as my 15" Powerbook. It has some fundamental flaws. It's too small. The screen is a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9 at a time when everything is moving in that direction. And the worst, most crippling problem - the clear polycarbonate window over the LCD is very glossy, and great for reflecting glare. In my situation of watching on the train, I spent a lot of distracting effort trying to hold the iPod so that nothing would get in the way of the image. I'm used to sitting on the right side of the train and the right orientation to avoid direct glare on my Powerbook. It has a good anti-reflective coating, but the iPod is designed and manufactured to be as slick as possible. It's basically a mirror.
After that disheartening experience, I rented the rest of the first season of Lost on DVD and watched it at home on a circa 1992 CRT TV and on my laptop commuting to work. That was much better than the iPod.
Since Lost is so addictive I had to get the shows from this season. I've downloaded other stuff using bittorrent before, but getting the second season was going too slow. So it seemed like a good excuse to try ITMS again and get the new episodes legally. It's certainly more convenient than going to the video store or even waiting for Netflix, but it's ultimately only good when you're desperate for a fix. We watched the 5 available season 2 episodes on my Powerbook, and even on a good screen, the quality sucks. The colors are really off, the aspect ratio is wrong, and the compression artifacts are atrocious. Moving faces often get reduced to a single blob with no features. If you can live with the DRM, ITMS makes some sense for music in comparison with P2P networks, but with video, P2P wins on quality and choice. The typical versions that are available through P2P are compressed more than a DVD, but are much better than the crunched stuff on the ITMS. The only thing the ITMS has going for it is speed of download, but half of that is because the files are so crunched.
I suspect that video for the iPod will do OK, but it will not take off the way that the ITMS has for music. Certainly, when the next Lost is out, I'll be downloading it using bittorrent, not ITMS.
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