Wishful thinking: a video iPod

[bluecell]

Macworld UK article (http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=6673)Gadget nuts call for movie iPod

By Macworld staff

Gadget vultures want to see video-enabled iPods claims UK gadget magazine T3.

Rumours predicting such a device have circulated since Apple launched its industry-leading MP3 player, so much so that in June Apple CEO Steve Jobs said: "I'm not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny little screen."

Now T3 has worked with Designworks Windsor to build a mock-up of what a video iPod could look like. The device is the cover feature in the September issue (available August 5).

Part of a regular series called Future Gazing, T3 looks at iconic products like the iPod, imagining what could happen to them in the next few years. "It's time for Apple to release a new iPod, but the new version won't be restricted to playing music – it'll play videos too," T3 writes.

The magazine proposes a 4.6-inch colour screen with a 50GB hard drive and built-in Bluetooth. The screen will be touch-sensitive so the device will have no "clunky buttons". There's more images inside the magazine.

"Let's hope the folks at Apple are inspired to bring us the real thing early next year," writes T3.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/news_images/july03/ipodrender.jpg

[fcuknu]

lah lah lah, overkill, lah, lah, lah. NOBODY will buy it. First of all, what are you gonna watch, beastiality? Second of all, if you had some dvds on your computer (most likley pirated), would u really wanna watch em on that lil screen? It would be cool, and I would probably buy one, maybe, but hey, there isnt a market yet. There are sitll a lot of people on 56ks who run under 1ghz, this is not its time yet

[SOS]

There are already miniture DVD players out there. To use a video iPod device, the movies would need to be released in a format that can be easily transfered to the device and so far the only digital formats like that are from pirated movies.

I guess a solution would be that the video Ipod would be able to store the DVD on its HD but then someone would find a way to crack the copy-protection software/hardware on the device and enable video Ipods to become mini decoders/encoders.

[bluecell]

It looks like Apple's starting to move in that direction. I talked about it before in here, they created this really nice video codec called Pixlet that allows high-def playback on a desktop. It's higher quality than MPEG-2, so I'm sure that if they scaled it down a bit, it will open a door to a new market. Sort of like iTMS did. The standards body that governs MPEG-4 has a new video codec that's supposed to rival MPEG-2 as well. We'll see what happens.