Live from Austin!

I’ve worked out how to take a typical AVI file download (generic MPEG-4 with MP3 audio, such as XviD) and convert it to something the Apple TV should be able to play without re-encoding all the video.

There’s also the elgato turbo.264, which approximately quadruples the speed of encoding video for AppleTV.

I tried re-encoding a good quality downloaded show that’s unavailable in the USA, using the QuickTime AppleTV preset. The result was indistinguishable from the original. So I’m really seriously considering AppleTV now.

So, how does AppleTV stack up as a way of replacing cable or satellite?

Mythbusters: $50 (30 episodes)
South Park: $24 (14 episodes)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $20 (13 episodes)
Venture Brothers: $20 (13 episodes)
Reno 911: $21 (14 episodes)
The Soup: $6 (per 8 episodes)

If we imagine Dr Who and Torchwood were also available at similar prices, that’d be about a year’s TV for maybe $200, or about 4 months of cable or satellite bills.

This ignores the option of watching shows by renting the DVDs from Netflix. Do that, and it’s an even more cost-effective option.

I’d be inclined to spend some of the freed-up money on “This American Life”, Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit”, and other shows that I currently don’t get to see.

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

Features required:

• Container format support: AVI, MPG, MP4.
• Video codec support: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD.
• Audio codec support: MPEG-1 layer III, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AAC.
• Component video output.

Features desired:

• Hard disk or SD cards for storage.
• Network connection.
• H.264 codec support.

Some options I know about:

• Apple TV. Pluses: Cheapish, nice UI. Minuses: Requires unsupported hacks.
• Mvix MV-4000U. Pluses: Dirt cheap. Minuses: No H.264.
• DViCO TVIX M-4000PA. Pluses: Works as regular FTP server.

Breakfast with a squirrel. Experimenting with the new MPEG-4 camcorder.

I’ve had it for over a month now, and I have to say the Oppo OPDV971H is great. If you dislike censorship, like obscure movies, or download unavailable TV shows and movies from the Internet, this is the player for you.

In a nutshell: It will play any DVD from any country in the world, on any TV in the world. It’ll also play XviD and DivX Pro MPEG-4 files on CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R, at resolutions up to 720×480. It runs at 110 or 240V, 50 or 60 Hz, so you can plug it in in any country.

If you have an HDTV, it has HDMI/HDCP and DVI output. If you have a reasonably new non-HD TV, it has component output and S-video. If you have an old crufty TV, it has plain old composite video too.

It has a Faroudja DCDi chip in, which is pretty much the state of the art in consumer upscaling. What does that mean? It means your regular DVD can be interpolated up to a proper 720p or 1080i signal, so you don’t see pixels or scan lines on your HDTV. It also does cross-color suppression, so your classic black and white movies stay black and white. It also does 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown, to turn movie DVDs into 24 fps progressive signals.

There’s the usual optical digital output for the audio, or coaxial digital if you prefer. It handles DTS as well as Dolby Digital 5.1. The onboard digital circuits are 192KHz 24 bit, and there’s a 3D virtual surround encoder for those who don’t have 6 speakers and don’t have a receiver that’ll do the job. There’s an adjustable delay to deal with lip sync problems caused by the advanced video processing; I find 30ms is about right.

It supposedly plays DVD-Audio. I haven’t tested that, because DVD-Audio is crippled into uselessness by its DRM—you can’t rip it for your iPod, car, or computer, and you need three extra cables because the music industry won’t allow the signal to travel digitally.

It also does slideshows of JPEGs burnt on a CD, and plays MP3s if you make sure the filenames are short (12 characters + extension).

Yes, it handles anamorphic just fine. Play anamorphic PAL region 2 releases on your NTSC TV, play PAL DivX rips scaled up to 720p, play NTSC DVDs on a PAL TV.

And the best bit: it’s $200, including the cables.

There are a few tiny downsides. The remote’s a bit crap (all the buttons look identical and the labels are hard to see). The disc drawer feels disturbingly flimsy. Sometimes the DivX decoder can’t quite keep up the frame rate at high bitrates, and you get a visible tear in the bottom third of the screen—but that doesn’t seem to affect DVDs. Oh, and it’s a bit slow to boot (you have to wait 3-4 seconds after power up before the tray will eject).

So: I say get one and give the finger to the MPAA. Watch the uncensored Region 3 version of Eyes Wide Shut. Watch UK comedy and Japanese Anime. Download bizarre 50s educational movies from the Prelinger Archives and view them from the comfort of your couch.

A lot of blather about the video iPod has missed the point. No, I don’t think that many people are going to want to buy 320×240 copies of TV shows and music videos at $2 each, that they can’t even burn to a DVD. That’s not why the video iPod matters.

You’ll notice that the new video iPod is still almost exactly the same as the old iPod, because it’s still primarily a music player. That’s why people will buy it, for music. If it was supposed to be a video player, it would have a bigger screen and smaller controls; you don’t need a big rotary dial for something you’re looking right at, but you do need things like brightness, contrast, and color controls, and probably a multi-way DVD-like joystick.

The point of the whole exercise is that Apple has about 90% of the digital audio player market. Now every iPod will have video, which means everyone buying a new iPod for its music capabilities will incidentally have the ability to play videos while they’re sitting bored on a bus or plane. They wouldn’t have bought a portable video player just for that, but if their iPod incidentally does the job, they’ll probably start encoding content for it.

And when they do, it’ll be MPEG-4, based on QuickTime, with H.264 video codec and AAC audio.

Right now, downloaded video is a mess of crappy pseudo-standards. Obsolete container formats like AVI and ASF. MPEG-4 codecs like XviD and DivX, but not put into actual MPEG-4 files, because that would be too useful. Dozens of crappy encoders and tutorials teaching people to assemble bastardized cross-breeds of Ogg audio and MPEG-2 video, XviD and MP3, H.263 in AVI containers, and so on. Plus, of course, the closed proprietary crap like WMV and Real.

Now thanks to Apple’s video iPod, out of the madness we might actually settle on a single standard that’s actually a standard. Every software encoder out there is going to have a simple preset for iPod, just like some of them already have simple presets for PSP. (Which is also MPEG-4, thank goodness.)

It’s basically exactly the kind of thing Microsoft would do. Use a 90% market share in one market to dictate the formats everyone will use across another market. Except that if Microsoft did it, they’d be dictating that everyone use their proprietary Windows Media standards, whereas Apple is going to push the entire industry into the open MPEG-4 standards—which are already cross-platform, playing happily on Linux, Windows, Mac, and a bunch of DVD players too.

If there’s a clear loser here, it’s Real. No matter how much they pretend to be open, they still keep their codecs locked closed, and refuse to allow anyone to legally transcode Real formats into anything else. That approach worked for a while, making them #1 in the market, then keeping them at #2… but now they’re going to drop to #3 or lower. Nobody’s going to want content in Real format that they’ll never be able to play on their iPod or PSP. The block on Real’s audio on the iPod might have been hackable (for a while), but hacking the iPod to play Real video is going to be impossibly hard. And if I’m not allowed to turn Real media into a format I can use, why would I even bother downloading it? Or encoding to it?

Meanwhile, MPEG-4 now has a fighting chance against Windows Media. Combine the video iPod with the gradual gains Blu-Ray has been making against Microsoft’s preferred option of HD-DVD based on WMV9, and the media landscape no longer looks like it will belong to Redmond.

I notice that 1GB of CompactFlash has dropped to under $100. It’s only a matter of time before it makes sense to replace DV camcorders with flash memory units. With MPEG-4 compression, a unit like the Fisher Sanyo FVD-C1 can record about an hour of NTSC quality video in a GB. (In fact, there are already some pro camcorders which use RAID arrays of CompactFlash, believe it or not.)

Sure, DV is cheap, but DV also sucks a lot. I won’t repeat the familiar reasons why tape needs to die; I’ll just add that MiniDV tapes are small and so there’s a tiny helical scan head whizzing around at very high speed inside the camcorder, which means you get a lot of audio noise unless you use an external mic.

What I don’t understand is why more companies haven’t done the obvious, and stuck the Hitachi mini hard drive from an iPod into an MPEG-4 camcorder. I realize MPEG-4 has compression artifacts, but I’d be willing to live with that. Shoot a few hours of video, plug the unit into your computer, pull the video across Firewire or USB 2.0 HiSpeed. A 10GB drive would probably do the trick for most people, and would keep the cost down. I shoot video with about a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of raw to edited footage, but I know that’s utterly unlike many–so put some basic “chop clip here, delete this clip” editing on the device itself, give it an analog scroll wheel for sliding through each clip.

OK, Samsung had the ITCAM-7, which they tellingly called a “gadget” rather than a camcorder. Unfortunately, they only stuck a 1.5GB hard drive in the thing, and it didn’t sell too well. C’mon, guys, it’s 2004, chuck a few more GB in the thing and try again.