Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote: You assume that people will be interested in the iPod because of its video capabilities. As a video device the iPod is fairly lame (smallest screen, no real playback controls, shortest battery life, no Divx support etc.)
I disagree. Have you actually played video on one? Just curious. The guy who reviewed for the New York Times called video on the iPod "completely immersive," and proved that by walking into a steel girder as he was watching a TV show. The playback controls are limited to pause, stop, play, and seeking back & forth. There's no frame-by-frame and no slow motion, but I'd hardly call the lack of those "no real playback controls." My response to "no Divx support" is WHO CARES. That's like dissing the iPod as a music player because it doesn't support Ogg Vorbis or something. Please.
The guy from the New York Times is David Pogue... He's an Apple shrill to the heart. If you think Thurrott is a shrill for Microsoft then this guy is three times as bad when it comes to Apple.
http://www.davidpogue.com/
I've used the iPod video, several PDA's (I've owned numerous iPaq's), a creative Portable Media Center, an iRiver H320, and the PSP. The fullscreen video on all of the devices was "immersive" with the iRiver being the worst and the iPod being right behind it. For all the things that people said about why PMC's sucked (small screen was probably the #1 complaint), the iPod video takes all those flaws and maginfy's them. In no way is it an outstanding video device in comparison to the rest of the market. It will sell because it's the new 5G iPod and you can't get one without video features but it's video features are not it's stong point at all.
As far as video codec support goes... The most popular video codecs are MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Divx/Xvid, and WMV- in that order. Guess how many of them the iPod supports? None.
kuaidang wrote:
2. You assume the only devices that are affecting this Video/TV battle are digital music players. Sony PSP's offer a huge video platform for content providers and I'm sure the next version of the portable device from Sony will do the same.
Karim wrote:
PSP = No hard drive. UMD = non-writable. What UMD content is out there is sanctioned by Sony. I've said it before and will say it again: if Sony had included a hard drive in the PSP, they would have killed the iPod by now. They didn't, because they're Sony, and Sony (like Microsoft) has a track record of getting it almost right in some things.
Two words: Memory Stick. Writable, Portable, licensed by many companies. While I do believe the PSP should have come with a hard drive it would be ridiculous to write off UMD or the PSP as a video device. Sony has sold around 10 million movies on UMD. I'd imagine the amount of videos on memory sticks is much larger. The PSP also has wifi as to support streaming content... the iPod does not have this. If you can stream content to a device then it's less neccessary to have a hard drive especially in the case of smaller videos like music videos, movie trailers and the like.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
Windows Mobile devices are selling very very well and have significant video capabilies as well. In addition to accessing content transfered from a computer they have the ability to wirelessly access content online from streaming sites (AOL Music, ESPN, MSN News etc.).
Windows Mobile? As in PDA? Again: hard drive. I used to play MP3s from my old Cassiopeia. I even had the video camera that snapped into the CF slot. I think I had enough memory to store, um, five or six MP3s. All Microsoft had to do was put a 20 or 30 GB hard drive in a PDA (or come up with one that snaps on), and I would have never gone near an iPod.
1. Some devices come with a hard drive (Palm LifeDrive and a few older Toshiba's).
2. You don't need a hard drive when you have Wifi, SD cards and CF cards.
3. Your Casio sucked. My iPaq 5555 with 512 SD card can hold hundreds of songs or about 4 one hour long TV shows. I get about 6 hours playing videos and 14 hours playing music.
4. Microsoft doesn't dictate whether or not any PDA will have a hard drive.
od UI on the front of a WinCE PDA's touchscreen -- including the scroll wheel. It was a brilliant idea. Apple sued it out of existence in about five minutes. Microsoft should have picked up on that idea, realized all that a PDA needed was a hard drive.
Karim wrote:
They didn't, because they're Sony, and Sony (like Microsoft) has a track record of getting it almost right in some things.
You mean "almost right" like a Media Center Interface with no DVR or TV capability? Or a video store that offers music videos that are free everywhere else and only 4 running shows at 320x240 (in "The Year of HD" no less)? Or how about flash-based music device that has no screen and plays songs in completely (well almost) random order? Or an MPEG-4 codec that came out years late and still didn't even offer B-Frames? Or an H.264 codec intended for video, high-def dvd and movies stores that doesn't support interlaced content and at the same time can't even be played back (in HD) on over 80% of the Macs sold in the last 2 years.
If you want to talk about Kool-Aid then you're drowning in it.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
Remember, the main consumer version of Vista will have MCE installed by default so it will sell in the millions.
You need the whole ecosystem. You need a battleship and tugboat. You need a portable player AND a computer.
Again, you are overvaluing the portable device. You're probably only doing it because Apple has a portable device that's doing well.
It's far more important to get video to the desktop and to the TV than it is to get it to a portable device. Handheld video is still a relatively unpopular compared to video and movies on the TV and desktop.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
BTW, iRiver, Archos, and a few others make digital music players that play videos and charge less than or about the same as the cost of an iPod.
They all suck compared to iPods. That's just my opinion though. Rather than get into a pointless, "I think think they suck, you think they don't" shouting contest, listen to what the marketplace is saying. [quote]
It's a completely false assumption that more marketshare == better. For instance, the market buys Windows XP machines 50 to 1 over the Mac. Simply put, there are other forces that affect marketshare other than quality and one of the biggest ones is popularity and brand recognition... which both Windows and the iPod both have.
Karim said:
kuaidang wrote:
The Mac Mini at $499 is vastly underpowered and adding in DVR or Media Center abilites will just raise the price a lot.
I thought the point of the thread was to discuss what Apple MIGHT come out with in January, and NOT how their current offerings are unsuitable to the task. I agree! Mac minis are underpowered for anything except web surfing and email. But Apple is 1) moving to Intel and 2) going to announce new products! You might as well argue how much an Apple II would suck as media platform.
And what makes you think that the move to Intel is suddenly going to cause the Mini to gain the magnitudes of extra power that it would need to be a good DVR (I'm speaking specifically of processing power, the ability to decode and transcode H.264, and hard drive space)? Even with Intel's Yonah core, it won't be possible to make a massive upgrade in power without raising the price or cutting other features.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
Apple's MPEG-4 SP sucks horribly. It doesn't even support B-Frames. Their H.264 codec is good but easily the worst H.264 codec you'll find and it uses by far the most CPU power to playback. H.264 playback on a Mini is not a pretty sight.
They seem to concentrating on H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10) which does support B-frames, I think? Again, whatever Intel-based stuff comes out in January, will probably have a little more oomph than the current G4 mini.
The problem is it doesn't need "a little more", it needs over double the power.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
Apple MPEG-4 basically equals Windows Media 7 or a badly encoded Windows Media 8. Apple's H.264 is a slight amount better than Windows Media 9 but it takes so much more power to playback that it's never worht the quality difference (which isn't even noticable unless you look really really hard).
LOL Ok so "Apple's codecs suck, except for the one that's actually better than WMV9, and in that case it doesn't matter because no one can tell the difference unless you look."
Dude there are Kool-Aid stains all over your mouth. LOL
Obviously you don't the situation but that's what I get for giving you the benefit of the doubt.
As simple as I can put this:
Nokia (among others) have done tests of H.264 against WMV9 and their findings are that H.264 is much better at lower bitrates but not at all (and sometimes worse) at higher bitrates. On average, I'd say the difference between Nero's H.264 and WMV9 at 768kbps is about 1-2%. And that's using the best H.264 codec available. QT7 has one of the worst H.264 codecs available and using interlaced content (such as TV) puts WMV9 lightyears ahead.
http://www.on2.com/cms-data/pdf/1123531744838491.pdf
http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2005.html
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5080/v05/undervisningsmateriale/mkt03c-mp4-h264-wmv.pdf
So assuming that you choose some content that encodes better in H.264 than in WMV9 (different codecs differ on different content) you could see a slight advantage with QT7. However, you'd need twice the amount of computing power to play it back and about 4-5 times more power to encode it. And again, it would have to be progressive video not interlaced like most TV.
Karim wrote:
Processor speeds are going up every day.
Yep. At the current rate it'll take 2-3 years or more to be able to encode Apple's H.264 as fast as we can encode or decode WMV today (given hardware of the same price). Right now, only the absolutely newest video cards can decode H.264 while WMV can be done on cards that came out almost 2 years ago.
Karim wrote:You neglect to mention the impact on DISK SPACE of the various codecs. Ordinary people don't care about minor differences in quality and B-frames. People care about how many TV shows they can record. For the same price, people will prefer a machine that stores 150 hours of video over one that stores 75. Particularly if the one that stores 150 hours of video looks nicer.
WMV and H.264 use about the same amount of disk space. And yes, people will care about video quality. Try watching some video in Quicktime's <PEG-4 then watch a version encoded in Quicktimes H.264. Big difference. Now imagine what these people paying thousands of dollars for TV's and home theather equipment are going to be able to see.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
He got a couple of disney shows but that's still far less content than what's available on a MCE 2005 install. People do seem fairly hesistant to put their content on iTunes, judging by the lack of new content that has appeared since it was announced.
It's been less than two months since they start selling video, for cryin' out loud. Come on. Major Hollywood content distribution deals aren't made over a 5-minute phone call and a handshake.
Obviously, Apple has been trying to recruit other content owners since before the video store launched or otheriwse they owuldn't have been able to get anybody onboard at launch.
These same movie and TV companies are announcing deals with everyone else just about every week and new content is showing up on Windows/Xbox Media Center's Online Spotlight just about every day but somehow Apple is taking months to hammer out anything, right?
[quote]FYI Fox just said late last week that they would LOVE to be in the iTunes Music Store:
http://news.com.com/Fox+exec+says+company+open+to+iTunes+deal/2110-1025_3-5979031.html
That's tantamount to Fox hiking up it's skirt in public to reveal an indiscreetly-placed "I ♥ Steve Jobs" tattoo. If you read between the lines, this means the talks are going on now. Try to give the experiment at least six months of doing MILLIONS IN DOLLARS IN BUSINESS before you call it a complete failure, ok?
That's akin to Michael Dell saying he would be interested in selling OS X. In other words it don't mean jack.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote: Microsoft's players range from Cell Phones and PDA's, to computers, to the Xbox 360.
The ones that have hard drives, you can't take with you, and the ones that don't have hard drives are useless. Hence no iPod. Just my opinion though.
Again, most people consumer their content in their home either at their computer or at their TV not on the go so you are overrating portablity. Second, streaming video is a dominant force on the internet so a hard drive is simply not needed for most (legal) content. The iPod, however, has no access to any streaming media.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
3. Not only are the codecs just as good (in practical terms) but they take a lot less power to playback and are capable of playing on many more devices. (I'm speaking specifcally of MPEG-2 and WMV vs. Apple's H.264)
See disk space argument above. For the same quality, you can have twice as much content using H.264 over MPEG-2.
Actually it's about 8 times more content in most cases but that's not the point. The point is the amount of power it takes to playback
Apple's H.264 is much higher than other codecs. For instance, I can play 1080p WMV HD on my machine at about 20% CPU usage but I'd need another processor to play QT7 H.264 at the same resolution and quality.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote:
It doesn't matter whether the videos are sold or whether they are ad-supported as long as the content publishers can make money off of them.
Well you can only sell through so many venues. Today, Disney might be able to sell 3 copies of Toy Story on Betamax, but it's not worth what it would cost to make those 3 copies.
Which very well might be why MCE 2005 has well over 100 content providers and Apple is struggling with 5 running shows (one was recently discontiuned). Vista, MCE 2005, WMP, and the Xbox 360 will get pretty much any content out to many more users than the iTunes video store will. The more people watch your content, the more you can charge for ads during your show. This is how television works... ad supported. Think about this for a second... 2,000 music videos and numerous TV episodes made about 2 million dollars total in about 20 days. That's less than $1,000 a piece total or less than $50 a day per episode/video. Now think about how much you think those ads on ESPN Motion cost for advertisers. The massive difference in how much an ad-supported video can bring in and how much iTunes brought in is simply staggering. Obviously one definitely worth using and the other is probably not.
Karim wrote:
kuaidang wrote: MCE's and Windows Media is on everyone's desktop and the Xbox 360 will be in everyone's living room.
All that food coloring can't be good for you.
You specifically said MCE & Windows Media on the desktop, and desktop <> living room. While there's room in this world for both, I think there's a LOT more people who want to record TV shows than who want to play video games. And at the end of the day, people will want to take their content with them, and that's kind of hard to do with an Xbox 360 unless you have a really, really, really long extension cord.
Yeah, it must be getting to me because I was just thinking that people probably prefer watching TV on.. well... their TV. I mean, judging by the 130+ million DVD players, 100+ million cable TV subscribers, and countless TV's sold you'd never know that people want video, tv, and movie content on their television sets, huh? That's a crazy idea.
BTW, the Xbox 360, PS2, and Gamecube sold around 140 million units over the last 5 years so I doubt there's more people wanting to record TV shows. And the Xbox 360 facilitates recording shows anyway.
