With Apple’s announcement of its deal with Disney/ABC to sell episodes of Lost and a few other shows on Apple’s iTunes Music Store I decided to spend a $1.99 of the 3 bucks and change that I had in my iTMS acount to check out the quality of the H.264 video encoding. Well after downloading Episode 3 of Lost from Season 2 I can say that the quality of the video is excellent.
Lets touch on file sizes here for a moment. For this episode of Lost which comes in at 43:29 in length the video is 197.8MB. It’s encoded in MPEG-4 video codec according to what Quicktime 7 is telling me, with the audio in AAC protected format using PlayFair 2.0 DRM. The video is encoded at 320×240 resolution at a bit-rate of 628kbit/sec. Below are some high quality JPEG screen captures from the video playing on my Mac:
So unless you lived under a rock today here is what happened:
New iMacs - Has better version of the iSight camera built-in, comes with a remote control and a media-center like application called Front Row, are somewhat thinner and have upgraded CPUs and video cards. Of significant note is that this is the first Mac I have seen sporting a PCI-Express video card. That was sort of underscored but that is a huge win for Apple. Same price on the 17 incher and the 20 incher is 100 bucks less. They are a great deal for anyone.
http://www.apple.com/imac/
New iPods - Supports video! 30fps for H.264 and MPEG-4 decoding! Both models thinner then the smaller 4G iPod! Comes in 30GB and 60GB models now. 2.5 inch 320×240 res TFT LCD screen. Supports video out with optional cable. Not mentioned much but with this new iPod as well as the Nano firewire sync support has been dropped, only USB2 is supported for syncing. Firewire can still be used to charge the devices however. $299 for 30GB model, $399 for 60GB model. In stores next week.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html
New iTunes 6.0 - Supports Video! You can download select ABC/Disney Channel TV shows (Lost, Desperate Houseviews, Nightstalker:ABC The Suite Life, That’s So Raven:Disney). You can buy TV shows for $1.99 the day after they broadcast. TV shows are ad-free. Also sells music videos for $1.99. iTMS now allows you to buy gift songs for others easily, has a Just For You section that suggest music you like based on previous iTMS purchases. Available for download now.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
http://www.apple.com/itunes/videos/
Updated Quicktime 7 - Pro version supports ability to encode video to size and formats supported on video enabled iPod. Available for download now (also is bundled with iTunes 6 download)
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
Get on a Mac or PC with Quicktime 7 installed on it to view the video of the special event here:
http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
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