Daniel Spisak on Technology

So over at Om Malik’s blog Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » Apple will do a video iPod we have been discussing the likelyhood of a video iPod and what that means. Of course the post was recently discovered by Slashdot and has nearly tripled in size but I wanted to address some of the concerns Paul Sloan of Business 2.0 brought up along with some of the other Slashdot commenters.

First of all, yes it points to Apple doing something that they are in talks with Iger. But as I pointed out, just having rights from say Disney and its owned partners is but only a slice of the total video content pie worth getting users access too.

With regards to the size/form factor of the device I realize a few have brought up the docking concept could apply here quite well. However, why even bother with making it an ultra-portable device when instead you could say make it the size of a Mac Mini and make it stackable! Certainly a CE version of a video iPod done this way would be much easier to come up with a cheaper to manufacture device with far greater options for high capacity storage. Everyone I think has sort of forgotten that the reason the iPod works so well is a combination of factors:

1. Audio in MP3 and other compressed formats only requires few to multi megabytes per song or album. This is a number that lends itself to being able to load all or most of a single track into memory do the iPod HD can spin down. This translates directly into increased power savings.

2. Video is not simple like audio is. In audio you’ve got MP3, WMA, AAC, MP3 Pro, Real Audio, and Ogg codecs. With video you have far more codecs to worry about supporting if you want to be viewed as progressive. You’ve got DivX (which version?), Xvid, MPEG-4, WMV9, WMV10, WMV8, Sorenson, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, MOV, etc. Plus the issue that some of these formats are merely virtualised container standards that could be any variety of video codec. This is a support nightmare for putting into firmware, not to mention issues of licensing rights to use certain codecs.

3. Playing back video requires real CPU power depending on the format or how you are going to play the video back. Think about it this way. If the video iPod is going to be a portable device that hooks into a dock for playback on a real TV set, etc then you are going to want to store video on it encoded for a resolution meant for playback on your TV set. However this now creates a playback problem while on the go because it means you have to scale on the fly your resolution down to your tiny screen. So do you encode your videos for your video iPods resolution or do you do it for your TVs intended resolution? What about HDTV?

4. Video playback requires a constant stream of data to be processed and if video clips are of any length longer such that they don’t fit into a RAM buffer you are going to have significantly decreased battery life as well as hard drive liftetime due to more time spent spinning to playback the video thus translating into more care needing to be taken cared of because the hard drive is spinning more often while the device might be in motion in your hand or body thus presenting more shock trauma potentially.

Hopefully this clears up some of the statements I made in my comment there.