Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It seems like everyone and his brother received an iPod for Christmas this holiday season. For the last month, my blog has gotten almost double the number of hits it usually gets, and I’m almost positive this is because of the two articles I wrote (here and here) about the Video iPod. Those articles are long and somewhat technical at times, so for new Video iPod owners they might be a little overwhelming.

Because Apple wasn’t sure how well their new video features would go over, they didn’t put a whole lot of effort into making it easy for people to learn how to put videos on their new toys. They also started with so few titles in their own store, that most people would naturally be quickly seeking ways of getting additional content from elsewhere. Really, all Apple was telling people was to buy an additional piece of software called QuickTime Pro. This has changed recently, but it can still be confusing for new iPod owners who expect to be able to just go home and click on the “put DVD movie on iPod” button. Of course there is no such button and you still can’t do this sort of thing with the ease that you can add a music CD’s to your iPod.

This all gave me the idea to compose yet another article about the Video iPod, but this one would be geared more towards people who were new to the iPod, to the world of digital video, or to both. You may even have some technical expertise, but this article should hopefully at least give you a real run down on what kind of options you have for getting video on your iPod.

I urge you to also read some additionl material that will really reduce your frustrations with your new iPod. Because Apple has a reputation for making things as easy as possible, they often don’t put information about how to do things they deem too “advanced” into the paltry manual that’s included with their product. While this is good for our trees, and perhaps a fair decision considering a lot of people won’t read manuals anyway, it often means that when people do want to do things that aren’t quite basic, they get lost. Well, luckily, there are plenty of places where you can get information online, so I thought I’d mention just a few.

Ilounge.com: this is a great place for information about iPods, an incredibly extensive collection of iPod accessory reviews, and a very active forum of users, some of whom are very knowledgeable (much more than me!) and are very willing to help those new to the iPod.

Apple iPod Yahoo! Group: If you’re more comfortable with an email list than a bulletin board, than the Apple iPod Yahoo! Group has some great information and users willing to help (including myself). One of the resident experts is a guy named Kirk McElhearn, who’s written a number of computer books, including a bunch on the Mac and the iPod.

Apple: Apple has a great support site for the iPod with answers to frequently asked questions, forums, and a special area called iPod 101 which has some great tutorials for beginners which go into a lot more detail then their manual.

But lets get back to Video, shall we? Where to begin? Probably the thing that comes to mind before even thinking about the iPod itself should be “what kind of video am I going to put on my iPod and where will I get it?” It’s a very basic first question that probably most of us don’t think about because we already have a specific source of video in mind. Even so, many people may also be unaware of some other kinds of video that may prove as valuable as the one they did have in mind! There are at least four major places to look for video that I can think of:

Where to Get Video

1. DVD’s: the source probably most people think of first is that of their own DVD library. You can’t simply tell iTunes to take your DVD and put it on your iPod. You need additional pieces (or piece) of software.
2. Home Video: probably the second most obvious source is video that you’ve shot yourself via a camcorder. You will probably need to convert this into a format that’s compatible with the iPod.
3. Online: Not quite as obvious is video you might find on the Internet. Ok, one of these is very obvious (iTunes), but the rest may not be:
   1. iTunes: the iTunes Music Store (which you can get to only through the iTunes program that came with your iPod) has a growing collection of TV shows ranging from really old ones to currently running ones, all selling at $2 a pop. It even has some free videos - short clips from Saturday Night Live, previews, short featurettes akin to what you might see on a DVD, etc. So far, there are no feature-length movies, but I have no doubt that these will come at some point. None of the iTunes video content require any real additional work other than making the purchase transaction and waiting as your file gets downloaded to your computer.
   2. File Sharing: there are certainly ways you can download copyrighted material illegally off the Internet. The entertainment industry, as it’s done before, is bungling yet another paradigm shift to online media. The can’t think creatively about how to work with this new world, but instead want to impose their old rules which just don’t work here. Eventually they will catch up, but in the mean time, they are forcing many people to illegally download material because they aren’t providing a legal (or affordable) way to get it legally. While we can all disagree on what should and shouldn’t be legal, I’m not going to suggest that you do anything that is obviously not legal, like downloading a movie that you’ve never paid for legally, and which you could easily do by buying the DVD or even renting it.
   3. Free Stuff: Why limit yourself (and put yourself in legal jeopardy) by downloading illegal material when there’s plenty of perfectly legal stuff out there? This massive amount of free video can be found primarily as:
      1. Video Podcasts: if you haven’t heard of “podcasts” you may have been living under a rock for the last year. Podcasts started out as just audio, but now come in video as well. They are basically just audio or video files that are hosted online for people to download. However, they usually are not just isolated single files, but an ongoing “show” that comes out at some regular interval and which you can, with the help of software like iTunes, subscribe to so that they are automatically downloaded and then transferred to your iPod whenever you plug it in. This makes the process of getting new episodes to watch something that doesn’t require any additional work after the initial setup. As I said, iTunes lets you subscribe to podcasts (just choose the “Podcasts” genre within the iTunes Music Store), and there are a bunch of other podcast applications out there as well. While not all of these video podcasts will play on an iPod without conversion, I think more and more are being offered in iPod-compatible formats.
      2. Public Domain: this content includes old movies and TV shows which have gone into the public domain mainly due to their copyright having run out, although some may have simply been offered to the public domain to start with or as a gift to the public way before the copyright would have expired. You can download these from the site Archive.org. There may be other online sources, but Archive.org is definitely the biggest.
      3. And More: there are still other sources of free content which aren’t podcasts and also aren’t on Archive.org. These include Google Video (here’s Google’s instructions on downloading video for your iPod) , and various other sources. There are at least a couple of websites that provide an ongoing list of new sources of video specifically made for the iPod which are very helpful: freeipodvideos.org and podguide.tv.
4. TiVo: yes, you can take the programs that you’ve recorded on your TiVo and transfer them to your iPod. Currently this isn’t supported by TiVo, although they have stated that they are planning to offer this functionality soon. In the mean time, there’s a third-party application that claims to do this from TVHarmony.com. I tried it, but it seemed to go so slowly that it would have taken many, many hours to convert just a 30-minute video, so something must have been wrong. Whether you use this or an upcoming TiVo product, you still have to get your video from your TiVo box to your computer, and that can sometimes be a slow process depending on what kind of setup you have. If you have a different DVR than a TiVo, in particular one made by a Cable or Satellite provider, chances are you won’t be able to convert video programs on it to your iPod. This may change, but for now you can’t do it as far as I know. Some of these companies have stated that they will be creating the ability to put the video on a portable device, but that device is not the iPod.

Adding Video to your iPod

Ok, so you’ve gotten your video that hopefully is in iPod-compatible format (if not we’ll deal with that later), but now it’s still just on your computer, you need to actually get it onto your iPod. While this is an easy task for anyone who’s owned an iPod before, for new iPod owners it may not be. If you buy videos (or download some of the free ones) off of the iTunes Music Store, then you don’t really need to worry - they are automatically added to your iTunes library and transferred to your iPod the next time you connect it to your computer. The same should hold true if you subscribe to a video podcast via iTunes.

If you’ve gotten a video from somewhere else, though, you will need to add it to your iTunes library. First, open iTunes if its not already open. Then in the File menu, choose “Add File to Library.” This will open up a dialog box that will let you browse through your computer’s file system so that you can locate that video file. Once you find it, select it and hit the Open button, and the file should then appear in your iTunes library.

There are a couple ways to look at your videos. One is via the “Videos” area in the “source” menu on the upper right:

If you don’t see such a menu item, than you may have it turned off in iTunes. To make it visible, Choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click on the “General” tab, which is the first, leftmost tab on the window that comes up, and make sure there’s a checkmark next to “Videos”:

Clicking on the “Videos” in the Source menu brings up a special page with a black background and thumbnail images representing the first second in each of the video clips, their title, and their duration (see screen capture above). Unfortunately, when iTunes displays this page, it needs to look inside each video clip to grab that thumbnail, and so it can take some time, especially if your computer isn’t the fastest and/or you have more than a handful of videos. Personally, I like to use the regular iTunes Library listing. You can see a lot more information, like when the video was added to your library, a rating if you’ve made one for it, comments, etc. However, if you have a ton of music on your iPod, you may not see the video file that you’ve just added right away in your library, let alone others that you’ve added before. A good way to filter your library to only show videos is by activating the search bar in iTunes. You do this by selecting “Show Search Bar” in the edit menu. If you only see the option “Hide Search Bar” that means the search bar is already visible. Here’s what it looks like:

Just click on the “Videos” and you will only see the videos in your library – this is a good way to keep track of these files if you have hundreds or thousands of music or audio book files on your iPod and don’t want to keep scrolling through these to find your videos.

Once these files are listed in your iTunes library, they will be transferred the next time you plug in your iPod. However, if the video isn’t compatible, you will get a warning from iTunes when it’s transferring to the iPod, which brings us to our next subject:

Video Compatibility

The iPod can’t simply play any old video file. Just as you can’t play a tape in a CD player, there are different file “formats” for video, and not all are compatible with the iPod. The iPod will only play a couple of different types of video file formats. They are both types of the file format known as MPEG4. One is called H.264 (also known as “AVC” or “Part 10″), and the other is sometimes just called “MPEG4,” but to be more exact should be called “MPEG4 Simple Profile” or just “MPEG4 SP.” If you look at the actual file, you might see a file extension (a few letters/numbers after the main file name) of “.AVI” or “WMV” or “.MP4″ or “.M4V” or “.MOV.” Only the last three are possibly (but not always) compatible with the iPod. Even if the file is in H.264 or MPEG4 SP, it won’t necessarily play on the iPod. There are some other settings within the video file that may not allow for this.

So how do you deal with this issue of compatibility? First of all, you can avoid it completely by using video content that has been made specifically for the iPod, downloaded from the iPod Music Store, and other places online. If you can’t find video that is already in iPod Format, however, you can actually convert it, which can be easy or hard depending on the tool you use, and perhaps a bit of luck. In order to convert video into an iPod-compatible format from a non-compatible one, you need to use at least one of a number of different programs:

Converting Video

Video clips are a bit more straightforward than convernting DVD’s, so lets go over these first. There are a few free options as well as many that will cost you, but usually not a very large sum.

Free Options
iTunes	This is a very new option as of this writing. Just last week, Apple came out with a new version of the free iTunes program (version 6.0.2), that I believe uses the same conversion engine that’s in their $30 QuickTime Pro application.Pros: it’s free, it’s integrated into iTunes so you don’t have to run a separate program, and it’s very simple – you just add the video file to your iTunes library, then choose “Convert Selection For iPod” in the Advanced menu.Cons: it takes a very long time compared to other methods and it’s not as flexible. For a 14-minute video I tried, it took about an hour and a half. If you extrapolate this out, converting one 2-hour movie would take around 12 hours! It also doesn’t let you control how your video is converted. *
Videora	Videora iPod Converter is the other free application that until last week was the only option for Windows PC users if you didn’t want to pay to convert.Pros: it’s very flexible, and it’s free. You can tell it how to convert your files in many ways – by the screen dimensions, the frame rate, the quality/size (bit rate), even what kind of audio quality you want along with the video. In addition, you can queue up a series of files you want to convert without having to come back to your computer after each is done. It also can convert files in a much shorter time than iTunes or Quicktime Pro – as low as around 15 minutes or so for a 14-minute video.Cons: the major downside to Videora is that it is not particularly easy to use. It’s free and the people who created it haven’t come out with a new version for over two months. It’s beta software, which means not all the bugs or user interface design issues have been worked out, and while they have a very useful discussion forum, it’s the fellow users who provide the answers, not the programmers, so they can only guess at some things, and of course can’t make fixes to the actual software. There is no real official support. If you are not afraid of spending some time trying to figure things out, it’s perfectly usable, but you will probably have to look through the discussion forums a lot as you run into inevitable problems. I’ve also posted a couple of entries (here and here) myself that go into a fair amount of detail about converting using Videora that might be helpful.
ffmpegX	ffmpegX is a UNIX application that was ported to Mac OSX (which is a varant of UNIX). While it may be more streightforward than the typical UNIX command-line application, it may not be as simple as many other programs made for the Mac. Since I don’t own a Mac, I can’t really speak to how simple this is to use or how well it works, but the engine it uses is used by many of these other converters Windows. If you are a Mac user and have used this, some feedback would be great!
iSquint	Another free Mac converter, iSquint looks like it will give you a lot of recommendations and hand-holding, but still let you tweak settings if you need to. Since I don’t have a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate it directly, but it seems to be the preferred converter out there for Macs. If anyone has used it, feedback would be great
3gp Converter	3gp Converter is a free Windows program that I don’t think tons of people use or even know about. It apparently is developed by a developer or group of developers in Japan. They don’t have an English language site, but here’s a Google-translated site which you might be able to at least glean a little from. Fortunately the program itself does have different language versions and there’s a simple but good tutuorial on how to use it here. The program itself is very simple. You just drag your video file onto it, and it converts it. It lets you pick a few different options in terms of bit rate settings, that yield a H.264 variations, and one high-quality, high resolution MPEG4 SP version suitable for outputting to TV. It converted all the video files I through at it, but I didn’t test every conceivable file, so their could be ones that it still has problems with. Still, for a free program, there’s no reason not to use this one until (or if) you run into problems.The one problem I did encounter was that it doesn’t seem to be able to format widescreen videos properly. There are no options for dealing with different aspect ratios, so it just stuffs everything into the same standard dimensions, so widescreen movies get squeezed and so look wrong.Maybe a new version will deal with this (the developer seems to come out with a new version somewhat regularly, although the last version was almost two months ago), and looking at their configuration files, one might just be able to change the resolutions there, but that would mean some extra work that detracts from the simplicity of this program.I would say, though, that for programs that are not widescreen, this is by far the easiest program I’ve used, albeit with few ways to customize the output. But if you’re looking for something that requires no learning curve and still gives you more output options than iTunes and does it several times faster, this is probably your best bet. It also happens to be one of only two programs (the other being iTunes) out of all of these (shareware and commercial ones included), that automatically adds the video to your iTunes library.
Nero Recode	I know that a number of people have gotten this Windows application to work, but I could not. Nero Recode is one of the many products within the collection of products branded as Nero. Initially I was confused about this and thought you could only use it if you bought the commercial product called Nero Ultra. That includes Nero Recode, but you can also download Nero Recode for free.In any case, I was able to convert files that would play through iTunes, but no matter how careful I was to customize these according to the settings that I knew would work on the iPod, these videos would not transfer. So, while you might be able to get this to work for you if you work at it, it’s probably not going to be easy for the beginner. It lets you see a lot of information and particularly for DVD conversions (you still need a seperate program to remove a copy-protected DVD’s encryption - see below), it looks like it would be very useful as far as picking a given audio track, subtitles, etc.

* What does this mean and why would you care? When converting a video file, just like when converting an audio file, you can make the end product smaller (so that you can fit more on your iPod). This size goes hand in hand with the quality of the video and is expressed as a measurement of “bit rate.” The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality and the bigger the file (and the longer the conversion will take to some extent). In addition to how small you make the file itself, you can also change the actual dimensions of the video as seen on the screen. ITunes just converts everything to the exact dimensions of the iPod’s screen, which is 320×240 pixels. In most cases, that’s fine, but if you ever want to be able to show these videos on a TV (or your computer), the small dimensions blown up to a 19″ Monitor or 27″ TV will not look good at all! More ondisplaying your video from your iPod to your TV below.

Of course, you don’t have to go with the free options at all. Even if you are on a budget, most of the options that cost money are only around $30, and hey, you spent $300-400 for that iPod and probably a bunch more for a case and/or some other accessories, right? So what’s another $30 for a program that will do all your video conversion chores? These are all Windows programs - I’ve yet to see any for the Mac that aren’t free except for Quicktime Pro which is now somewhat irrelevant now that iTunes can do the same conversions it can

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The problem really is in choosing the right one of these programs for you. There are a growing number of these programs and probably a lot of similarity between them. I’ve tried out a bunch of these to test them, but haven’t spent nearly the time on them that I have with Videora, so my personal recommendation would actually be to read these micro reviews and then download and try out the ones that sound good to you (or all of them for that matter), since they all have trial versions for free download. Those trial versions have limitations that make them unusable or at least very impractical for anything but testing purposes, but they will give you a good idea about how easy they are to use and how well they work..

Options at an Added Price
PQDVD	PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter is the application that I seem to hear mentioned about most online, probably because it also lets you record DVD’s (see below). You can convert many different types of video files with it and specify quality/size (bit rate) settings, dimensions of the screen, whether you want to crop or stretch the image to fill more/less of the iPod’s (or your TV’s) screen, etc. It makes many of these options fairly easy to understand in a graphical, uncluttered way, and the conversion (as with most of these non-free programs), is pretty quick. However, PQDVD doesn’t have quite the flexibility of some of the others. Basically you sacrifice some flexibility for ease-of-use.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft iPod Video Converter is more flexible in some ways than PQDVD, as it lets you specify the type of encoding you want to use (similar to Videora). But unlike Videora, it also gives you recommendations for the best choice of settings and also gives you more information about how various settings will affect your final video. Cucusoft also, like Videora, has a batch feature so that you can give it multiple files and then let it run for a long time without the need to come back and tell it to convert each and every one. Unfortunately Cucusoft was the only program of the ones here that I got to work in the first place which didn’t automatically determine the correct dimensions for the widescreen video I fed it, so this means a bit more work in figuring that out for different videos.	$29
Xilisoft	Xilisoft iPod Video Converter lets you customize settings, but doesn’t give you much help in this area. There are pull-down lists of possible settings, but many of these have just one option, and so if you don’t like it, you have to type in your own. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this could very easily create files that aren’t compatible in some way with the iPod. So it seems that it doesn’t provide much in the way of ease-of-use. To me, this seems the closest program in some ways to the free Videora, except that it doesn’t allow the user to set up different profiles for different types of convesions, and it costs $30.I attempted to convert a test .avi file (which converted fine on all the other products), but the end result couldn’t even be added to my iTunes library, let alone to the iPod. This was using the default settings for the program. Perhaps I needed to change them, but the point is here that this is not a program for beginners so I’m not sure why anyone would pay $30 for it when a similarly difficult program is available for free.	$29
ImTOO	I’m not sure which of these programs came first, but it appears that ImTOO is just a rebranding of Xilisoft or visa versa. The prices for each of the conversion programs, the dvd-ripping programs, and the bundles are identical. And if you look at the screenshots of Xilisoft and of ImTOO, and you will see they are also virtually identical!	$29
WinAVI	WinAVI 3GB/MP4/PSP/iPod Video Converter (maybe they need to come up with a catchier name?) has some interesting features which I’m not sure I’d use, like being able to flip the image upside down and soften it. (What I’d really like to see is something that would increase the brightness of an image since some darker videos are difficult to see if you have a protective screen that produces glare and you’re not in a dark room.)WinAVI lets you control the dimensions of the video and the bit rate settings, although the numbers they use seem not to coincide with what the standard bit rate options are. It will also let you split the output file into multiple files, or merge multiple input files into one output file. I’m not sure what I would use those for, but I know some people have uses for these features. A batch mode also adds to the functionality.	$25
AVOne	AVOne iPod Video Converter seems the least polished of any of these programs. First of all, it took much longer to convert the file. It’s batch feature doesn’t seem to work. It has only a few built-in profile setups, and while it lets you create your own profiles with many settings options, it gives you absolutely no help in figuring out what those settings should be. Finally, after a couple of tries of specifying exactly where I wanted my output file to be saved, after converting (which took a lot longer than the other programs), I simply could not locate any output file on my computer.	$25
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder is the most expensive converter. It is fairly easy to use and understand, and has a lot of customization features if you want to tweak things. Unfortunately, while it was able to convert some video files, it was unable to convert one that I had downloaded from a digital camcorder. The other programs didn’t have such a problem, except for Videora which also couldn’t convert it. The resulting file when played in iTunes was covered with green and red blocks constantly moving. At first I thought this was feature that prevented one from using a trial version for real use, but after converting another file that wasn’t from my video camera, it played fine in iTunes. I was able to transfer both files to my iPod. So far so good, except when I tried to play either one, not only did the iPod not play the files, but playing them actually caused the iPod to reset! I did not use any special settings for these conversions, so while there may be some ways to avoid these problems, it’s another case of a program that takes a lot of extra work. While I didn’t mind this extra work for a free program like Videora, it seems a bit too much when paying $45! Some people have no problem with this program, so, as I stated at the beginning, you might want to try it out - even though I didn’t get it working doesn’t mean you might not have great luck with it.	$45

Once you convert your video to an iPod-compatible format, you still need to add them to your iTunes library in order to have them transferred to your iPod, so check out the section about doing this above.

ITunes to iPod

As I mentioned above, if your video isn’t compatible with the iPod, it won’t transfer to it even if you’ve been able to add it to iTunes and even if iTunes can play your video. iTunes can play many kinds of video files, but as I’ve detailed above, the iPod has a lot more limitations. However, there does appear to be a problem that some people have run into when trying to transfer video to their iPod even when it is compatible. That problem is in a setting in iTunes that turns off automatic transfers of videos. Some people have suggested that this is actually the default setting, so I would recommend also double-checking that you have this set correctly. You will need to first plug your iPod into your computer, and when your computer recognizes the iPod, choose Preferences from the Edit menu. Then go to the iPod tab, which is the second from the left. Here make sure that the topmost “Automatically update all videos” is selected:

Note that this only applies to those who have their iTunes set to automatically synch their files. If you have it set for manual transfer, then this tab will be disabled. In this case, like with music files, you just have to drag the video file from your iTunes library onto the iPod icon in iTunes in order to transfer a video to it.

DVD’s

For DVD’s, it can be a little more complicated than converting a video clip that you download off the Internet from one of the free sources I’ve mentioned, or via the iTunes Music Store. DVD’s were never meant to be converted or copied. They contain an encryption scheme called CSS (Content Scrambling System) that is supposed to prevent this. Within just a couple of years after DVD’s hit the market, though, CSS was cracked and this crack, known as DeCSS, became widely available on the net both as pure code, as well as parts of numerous programs designed to allow the average user to “decrypt” their DVD’s. Depending on which country you live in, these programs may or may not be legal to use. The whole issue of legality is very confusing. On the one hand, in the U.S., “fair use” seems to dictate that one should be able to freely make backup copies of a DVD you own for personal use. On the other hand, part of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act specifically forbids compromising the copy-protection for a DVD. There are numerous court cases that are trying to determine exactly what is legal and what isn’t, but in the mean time, such programs are available and being used ubiquitously, making things that much more uncertain.

In any case, in order to put your DVD’s into an iPod compatible format, you will need to transfer the file to your hard drive, remove the encryption, and then finally convert it to a format that’s compatible with the iPod. This can require one or two different programs depending on what kind of functional is included. Again, there are both free ones and ones that have a price tag:

Free Options
DVD Decryptor	The developers of this Windows application were forced to remove it and they were eventually bought by Macrovision. One can find the application on the net, but it’s legality is in question. It will allow you to break the encoding of a DVD and transfer it to your hard drive, after which various conversion applications can be used to make it iPod-compatible. Videora has a tutorial on their site on how to use it to create the inital file. Be forwarned, though, this is not a program designed with ease-of-use in mind.	$0
DVDFab Decryptor	DVDFab Decrypter is another program that’s similar to DVD DecrypterThis is another program similar to DVD Decryptor but with a simpler infterface. It copies the files from the DVD to one’s hard drive and removes the encryption in the process. Just note that it, like DVD Decrypter, will not create a file that is iPod compatible. You will still need to convert it using one of the programs listed above.	$0
Fair Use Wizard LE	This Windows application takes a slightly more user-friendly approach than DVD Decrypter, guding you through the process of converting your DVD a little more. But it’s also different in that it doesn’t just decrypt, but decrypts and converts to an xVid format video file. This process itseld could take a couple of hours, and then on top of this you will have to reconvert it to an iPod-compatible format. The same site has a $20 program that will supposedly convert to iPod-compatible formats (see below).	$0
HandBrake	HandBrake is the one free Mac option that will remove the encryption on a DVD and save the resulting file to your hard drive. Since I don’t own a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate this myself, but if anyone does own this, feedback would be great.	$0
Options at an Added Price
AnyDVD	This Windows Application will remove the encryption from a DVD, after which you will need another program to convert it to an iPod-compatible format. At first I thought it might be more of a wizard than DVD Decrypter, but really what it’s meant to do is to do the decryption transparently. That way you can tell a conversion program to look at one of the files on the DVD itself, or maybe you still need to copy it to your hard drive, but the decryption happens as you copy. The problem is that there’s no good way of figuring out what files are for what on the DVD. Sure some may be simple if there’s only one file or a few with similar names, but that’s not always the case. For some movies, you have many files each representing a different chapter. On DVD’s of TV episodes, you can have one or more files representing each episode	$39
PQDVD	Yes, I already mentioned PQDVD above, but it also will let you convert DVD’s. However, I’m not sure if it actually removes the encryption from DVD’s like some of these other programs, but rather streams the dvd video at faster than normal speed and somehow “captures” it and converts it on the fly. You will actually see the DVD playing while it’s converting. I’m not sure if I was simply doing something wrong or if my system did not have enough free memory or processor speed, but while it did convert a small clip for me successfully, when I played it back both in iTunes as well as on my iPod, the audio was badly distorted.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft also makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows which seems to work very similarly to PQDVD, but gives the advanced user more access to custom settings. Of course many of these settings will be meaningless if you are at all a beginner at this stuff. I also experienced the same audio distorions with this product as with PQDVD, so chances are it’s a problem with audio on my computer. The other thing I could not figure out with this program was how to limit the program to just a specified length of time. This would be helpful for recording a bunch of TV episodes on a DVD into seperate files (especially if these are not seperated into seperate files on the DVD), but it doesn’t seem like there’s any easy way to do this here, whereas in PQDVD, one can scroll through to find exactly where one episode ends and another begins, and then you can specify when you want the start of the recording and the end to be.	$30
Xilisoft	Xilisoft makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows as well, and it seems to work in a similar way as the previous two. Unfortunately I could not get it to work at all. Others I know have been able to get it to work, and I know there have been some complaints concerning audio syncing. But without even being able to record anything myself, it’s impossible for me to say much about this tool.	$29
Fair Use Wizard	Fair Use Wizard also offers a “Full Edition” that provides some additional features. Whether those features are worth it, I’m not sure, and there’s no way to try them out, since the Lite edition is the only one you can download from their site without actually paying. However, from what I can tell from the Lite Edition, it has some option for iPod Video, so it might be useful as an all-in-one DVD conversion tool.	$20
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder also has a DVD recording facility that works somewhat like PQDVD and CUCUSoft, except that it doesn’t actually play the DVD while recording, at least not in a way that’s visible to you. It offers a good deal of flexibility and it’s pretty easy and straightforward. Unlike PQDVD and CUCUSoft, when I played the sample I had recorded in iTunes, there were no problems with the audio. This could have just been a fluke, but it was still very promising. Then I transferred the video over to my iPod and started to play it. The same thing happened as with the non-DVD video clips I had converted with this same program - when starting to play the file, my iPod would reset itself. Not good! Again, maybe I was doing something wrong, or I wasn’t setting something in the right way, but for a $45 program, I really don’t think it should be reseting my iPod unless I really screw with the settings in a very creative way!	$45
DVDFab Express, Gold, Platinum	DVDFab Decryptor is a free program, but the same developer has made several other versions that have various other capabilities which may be useful for some people, but aren’t necessary to get one’s DVD video onto an iPod. Still, if these extra features appeal to you and you can afford the price, than it might be a good option. I chose not to try these out myself since I successfully tested the free version and can’t imagine these would be that different.	$40-60

TV Playing

One other issue that I alluded to above is that you can actually take your iPod to a friend’s house (or on vacation, or on a business trip, etc., etc.) and play a video for them not just on the iPod’s screen, but on a TV that you hook your iPod to in the same way that you would hook your DVD player to your TV. Unfortunately the iPod can’t do this “out of the box” but instead requires the purchase of an additional cable. Apple sells one for $30, although you can get it for a lot cheaper at Amazon.com or even cheaper at Handhelditems.com and a retractable one to boot.

Because the iPod screen is so small, the standard iPod-compatible video is pretty small in resolution – 320×240 pixels. When this tiny image is then blown up to fit a much larger screen, everything gets that much fuzzier. In order to avoid this, you can convert the video in such a way that the resolution is higher, and some of the applications I’ve listed will actually guide you with the words “TV.” However, not all programs let you do this, even if you do it yourself with customized settings. If you convert something to a higher resolution for this type of usage, it will come at the price of added conversion time and storage space, and you won’t be able to convert to just any resolution - at some point you also bump up against a limitation of what the iPod can handle, so you will never get, for example, a DVD-quality video image played from your iPod to a TV. It may look very good, and you might not even be able to tell the difference on a small TV (19″ or smaller) between a video played through your iPod and one from a DVD player. Still, for anything bigger than a 19″ set, the picture will be inferior. And compared to a true high definition picture, forget it! If you do want to convert to higher resolutions, I would recommend taking a look at the two entries (here and here) I posted about converting with Videora. Whether you use Videora or not, these will at least give you some ideas about what issues to look for.

Final Notes

When Apple came out with the Video iPod back in late September of last year, they did it very tentatively – at least as far as video was concerned. They provided only a handful of TV series in their iTunes Music Store, and in order to make other sources of video play on the iPod, Apple would only tell you that you needed to purchase their QuickTime Pro at $30 additional charge. As you can see, in the proceeding three and a half months, a slew of new content has come out both within the iTunes Music Store and on the net in free form. In addition, many companies have been developing programs that make getting your videos onto your iPod. It’s still a little confusing for the average consumer, though, but if the progress during these first few months is any indication, things should get easier and easier, sooner rather than later. In the mean time, I hope this guide has helped some of you get your mind around the various tasks, options, and concepts concerning getting video onto your iPod.

Several weeks ago, Apple announced their newest version of the iPod, the much anticipated one that allows owners to watch videos.

I generally have very good rationalizations when it comes to upgrading my gadgets and this time was no different. After all, I had resisted getting the photo iPod when it came out earlier this year. No, I figured, there needs to be a very significant value added over and above what I have in order to upgrade. Having a better screen, even allowing you to view pictures (something I could do on my Phone for years now) was not enough.

While I said I’m not the biggest video buff, especially these days with a new baby in the house, the various new features and enhancements that were better than my old 4th Generation monochrome iPod (all of a year old now) just added up to a critical mass and convinced me that it was time to upgrade:

For one, there’s the video, of course. While I’m probably still probably going to be using the iPod 99% or more for audio, it would be nice to load many of my unwatched DVD’s that I’ve been wanting to watch for years, not to mention TV shows that I miss on a regular basis these days, or whole series that I missed out on. As you may have heard, Apple and Disney teamed up to offer some of Disney’s content, which includes some ABC shows like “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”. I’d always heard raves about Lost, but never got around to watching it last year and I’m one of those people who refuse to pick up watching a show when I haven’t come in at the beginning – at least dramatic shows. While buying the shows individually can add up at $2 a pop, one thing that I haven’t heard mention in the other articles I’ve read about these downloadable shows is that you can actually buy a season’s worth of a show for nice discounted - about $1.40 per show instead of the normal $1.99. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with a season that isn’t complete - I can’t pay for all of season 2 of Lost because it hasn’t all been made available yet and Apple just doesn’t seem to have the mechanisms in their iTunes Store to handle this kind of “subscription” of ongoing content. Maybe their venture into podcasting will help them implement something like this in the future, though.

Then there’s home video. We got a digital camcorder last Spring in anticipation of our first child and I’ve been slowly trying to figure out video editing and production. I figured it would be a nice thing to keep a collection of clips of events or just clips of our daughter playing and smiling.

The new iPod will also let you record audio at 44kbps, rather than a measly 8kbps for previous models. Not that I have any big plans to start my own podcast, but this does at least open up the possibility of recording audio on the go, whether that’s just notes to myself, a conversation, a class, or our daughter “talking” to us.

The large capacity of the 60GB iPod would seem like more than enough for all your possible needs, but Video can take up a LOT of space. We are talking hundreds of megabytes per hour - and that’s highly compressed! Even at 60GB, Apple states its capacity at all of 150 hours of Video. This might seem a lot, but I have about 1,400 hours of Audio Books currently on my iPod, and these take up less than 20GB. This audio book collection keeps growing as I continue to download books from a subscription to Audible.com and little time to actually listen to them and move them off the iPod. Another 12GB or so are taken up by a music collection which I’m sure will grow as our daughter gets older and we put more music for her on it. Finally, there are couple of gigabytes of podcasts that I can’t seem to get caught up on either! So already I was getting dangerously close to my old iPod’s limit of 40GB! That extra space will really be useful, although of course I would love to have 100GB (or 200GB for that matter) instead of 60GB!

My old iPod supposedly had 12 hours of battery life, and while that might have been true initially, it always seemed the battery meter was getting low way before that time. It could be the battery meter was just faulty, who knows. In any case, the new 60GB model that I bought is rated at 19+ hours of playtime for music, so I think I could safely listen for many days without having to recharge. Of course, Video can kill the battery in around 3 hours, so if I end up using it a lot for that, I may have to look into a battery pack that expands battery life to 9 hours for video.

Finally, the new iPods are considerably thinner than the old ones. For someone who has lots of gadgets and sometimes carries them in pockets, this definitely helps me not look like a total buffoon, in addition to just being more comfortable to carry.

Oh yes, also, I figured, I could sell the old iPod on eBay and not pay full price for the new one.
Equipped with an airtight rationale for upgrading, I went to the Apple store the week after the new iPod was announced and was told that it wouldn’t be in until the end of the month (October). However, on the iLounge.com forums, people were sighting them at other Apple stores across the country, so I kept coming back and pestering the poor Apple store staff. Within a couple days they had the 30GB model, but it was not on display. Instead the item was tucked in the pocket of one of the staff that let me look at it. He said there would be no 60GB model until the following week, but I knew that these estimates seemed always to be very conservative. So I continued to return every day and ask if they had a 60GB model and within just a couple of days, they did and I grabbed it!

Impressions

My general impressions of this “5th Generation” iPod model are generally favorable. I’ll talk about the video aspects of it below, but other than that, it seems to work as well, for the most part, as my old iPod. The big color screen is of course a whole lot prettier than my old monochrome model, but it also seems a bit more “sluggish” in its display. That is, when navigating between tracks or even between the different “pages” of an individual track (the scrubbing page, the album art page, the rating page, etc.), the screen doesn’t transition immediately, but lags a second or two before changing. When navigating to the next track, the audio for that track kicks in immediately, but the screen stays on the old track’s info for a second or two before changing. This isn’t a huge deal, but it makes it feel a lot less responsive than I would like. A couple of other minor issues that may or may not annoy some people follow:

1. The lack of a true power supply. All previous iPods had a separate power supply to charge the unit, but for these, you have to charge them via the computer via the supplied USB cable. Not particularly convenient if you want to take the iPod with you on a trip and don’t want to or can’t bring your computer! You can still buy a power supply separately, but for the price, Apple really shouldn’t be REMOVING accessories that were previously included.

2. The lack of a firewire interface. IPods can no longer connect to a computer via firewire. Some people believe firewire is faster than USB2 despite that according to the specifications USB2 is slightly faster. I’ve also heard that for video transfer from digital camcorder, firewire is critical. But I’m not sure how much of that is pure transfer speed and how much are other factors like consistently steady throughput. In any case, there’s probably not a tremendous difference between the two and so you wouldn’t notice a big different unless you are transferring a significant amount of content.

3. The removal of the port on the top of the iPod which many accessories use. This essentially has made these iPods incompatible with dozens, if not hundred of accessories that used this port. I had two of these myself, which I was fortunately able to sell along with my iPod. Many others, I’m sure, would have much rather keep their accessories, especially if they were expensive to begin with and/or can’t be resold for much.

Video: is it the Video iPod or iPod with Video?

When these new iPods first came out, Apple touted them not as the “Video iPod” but as an iPod “with Video capabilities.” It was as if they still weren’t ready to come out and say that video was in any way a central feature. They had to qualify this release by saying that the iPod was still primarily a music player. Whether this was BECAUSE they didn’t think the video capabilities were good enough, or whether they actually didn’t put everything they could into making video as good as it could be, I’m not sure. What I do know is that video on the iPod works reasonably well considering the small screen size, and some other issues that I’ll get to below.

As far as screen size is concerned, Apple enlarged the screen as much as they could within the confines of the standard iPod dimensions. They even sacrificed a bit of size of the click wheel in order to do this. Sure, they could have radically altered the design by stretching the screen across the entire front and changed the click-wheel to some other interface, or even implemented a touch screen that included the clickwheel as an image on that screen instead of an actual hardware click-wheel. Obviously, though, Apple did not want to take such a big risk in radically altering the interface that has helped them win and maintain such a commanding majority of the MP3 player market. As it stands, the screen is certainly watchable, but I don’t know if I would want to spend multiple hours staring at it! Even holding it up close, watching an episode of Lost, I felt a little like I was taking the images in through a straw. A big straw - maybe something akin to the cardboard tube that paper towel is wrapped around – but still it was constraining, if you understand what I mean.

The other way that Apple made a very hesitant step in the direction of Video was in its choice to only allow a couple of video formats to be compatible with the new iPod. Neither of these formats is proprietary per se, but they are not particularly popular outside of Apple’s own software. I’m sure part of this was also to prevent those who have big libraries of video in more popular formats (read “DVIX”), that they’ve either converted themselves or gotten illicitly off Grokster or BitTorrent, from easily playing them on the new devices, thus getting Apple slammed by big media companies as being too friendly towards file sharers. The result is that you can still do this, but it just takes more work: if you have a bunch of DVIX-encoded video files, you just have to convert them yet again to H.264 or MPEG4.

As for what kind of content there is available, you can download a select list of ABC TV shows - five to be exact from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. You can also download around 3,000 music videos. Whether it’s a 3-minute music video or a 30-minute TV show, the price is still $1.99. Apple also announced that, after the first 20 days from the launch of the new iPod and the video content in the iTunes music store, over 1 Million of those videos had been purchased. They did not reveal how many were the TV episodes and how many were music videos. Not bad considering this product was brand new and wasn’t even easy to find in stores for the first couple of weeks after the launch. Then again, I wonder how much of these purchasers were people like me who don’t plan to make a habit of doing it, but still wanted to see a sample of what they could have on their new iPods without going through all the effort of converting.

Unfortunately, it seems that the other networks are not jumping onto the Apple bandwagon, but at least for now scrambling to sign deals to make their content available in other “downloadable” forms. NBC has signed a deal with DirectTV and CBS has signed a deal with Comcast so that respective users of these services can download shows onto their DVR. But you can’t then transfer these shows to a portable player, which is the main feature of the iPod. So, this then forces people who want to have portable content into either recording these shows themselves and converting them, or even worse obtaining illegal copies on the Internet - all because the networks still want to limit how people watch, despite this supposed venture into new forms of content distribution. Just today AOL and Warner Bros. announced a new online venture to bring older tv shows to the internet, but again, there seems to be no plan to offer an option for content portability. Another announcement today from Hasbro does involve portable content, but only through Hasbro’s VUGO device. Even at best it looks like the interests involved will still end up carving out small domains where only certain content is available via a given service/device. A fragmented mess that’s bound to encourage pirates to record or obtain the content illegally and crack the protective DRM that prevents it from playing on all but one device.

Of course, as with music, one might already have a lot of video in the form of DVD movies. These movies can be transferred to the iPod, but it isn’t a trivial process. It takes time, some degree of technical knowledge, and experimenting with tools that are still clunky, in beta, or which will cost you additional money. And don’t expect Apple to help you very much in this effort. Apple’s tool for converting video to a format the iPod plays, Quicktime Pro (Mac users can also use iMovie), will not convert a DVD for you in and of itself - you still need a DVD decoder. Even then, Quicktime Pro is a $30 program and is one of the notoriously slowest video converters out there, although it does seem to work predictably without much hassle. Other applications are a lot speedier, but some have had difficulty in getting them to work at all. Some video formats simply won’t convert in some of these applications, whereas other problems could be in the various settings that one can use for a given conversion (bit rates, keyframes, resolution, etc., etc.) that aren’t exactly within the iPod’s constraints.

I experienced this myself in a free converter for Windows called Videora iPod Converter when I tried to convert some home video clips that were in uncompressed AVI format - what I thought was one of the most basic video formats. These AVI files were created with Adobe Premier Elements and whenever I tried to convert them, they would either not transfer to the iPod or they would only produce an audio track, not a video track. After trying just about every setting I could think of, I finally converted the AVI file to another format, and then converting it with Videora. This worked immediately. Other programs that offer conversion and dvd decryption in one package and have gotten some good reviews are Nero Recode and PQDVD on the PC side, and Handbreak on Mac (and Linux).

In addition to the video that one can download from Apple and the video that one can convert from DVD, there’s yet another category of freely available content available on the internet - video podcasts, video blogs, and other such episodic content. A new site that was just created to link to various kinds of content like this that is available in formats that will work right off the bat with the new iPod is FreeIpodVideos.org. A couple of other great sources for free video that you will undoubtedly have to convert to play on the new iPods are the Internet Archive’s Moving Images and Google Video.

The one other video issue that I hadn’t thought much about before I got the iPod (mainly because I’ve never had a video-capable device like this) is the issue of outputting the video to a TV. Now, one might ask why you would want to do this if the whole point of having a portable player is to watch things away from home. True, but at the same time, if you could watch something on a much bigger screen, wouldn’t you opt for that, especially if you want to share the video with multiple people? Just as people bring their iPods to friends and hook them to a stereo so that everyone can enjoy your music collection, so too can you share videos or pictures. You still have to buy an extra connector to do this either via Apple for $20, or from a Radio Shack or place like it for a bit less.

Once you export the video to TV, you will see that video that has been optimized specifically for the iPod within its native 320×240 resolution, and it will not look very good except on sets that are at most 25″. Since most people tend to have larger TV sets these days, this becomes a problem. One way to avoid it is by changing the resolution to something higher than what the iPod itself displays. The iPod will then just scale it down when displaying it on its small screen, but will display all the resolution when connecting to a TV – given the TV can display the given resolution. Unfortunately there are still limits. Apple lists a max resolution for MPEG4 files as 480×480. This is somewhat of an odd resolution, being completely square, as opposed to the more rectangular standard TV screen or the even more elongated widescreen dimensions. But that 480×480 is a bit misleading. What it really means is that 480 pixels times 480 pixels yields a total of 230,400 pixels. So one can create videos of ANY resolution as long as their total pixel count doesn’t exceed this. For example 640×360 also comes to 230,400 pixels, but is much more rectangular. In any case, when you pump up the resolution from 240 vertical lines to 360 or even higher, the picture becomes much more watchable on a large TV.

The one issue that remains may not be an issue for everyone, but it is for anyone who has a widescreen TV. It appears that the iPod doesn’t support a way to export anamorphic widescreen video to a widescreen TV. By this I mean that anything that is played on a widescreen TV via the iPod, whether that source video is in a widescreen format or not, does not fill the entire widescreen TV. Rather, they show up in the middle, so there are boxes on the sides as well as the top and bottom. I have asked on the forums about this and no one has given a satisfactory definitive issue. I even tried to get in touch with Apple, but I guess a lowly blogger is not worthy of a response. If they somehow surprise me after a week and actually answer my question, I will post an update here. Here’s an image of a widescreen movie playing on the iPod itself:

And here’s an image of that same movie piped out to my widescreen TV:

Again, this probably is not going to be a huge issue with a lot of people right now, but I was really hoping that this would work since most of my DVD’s and all my recent home video is filmed in widescreen. So having to watch it in this small area within my TV set seems a bit pointless. Then again, I could always export the home videos to DVD and get full resolution displays, it just would be nice to be able to view them in the same (or almost the same) way via the iPod on my own and other people’s widescreen TV’s…

Back a few years ago when I was watching very little TV, so-called “Reality-TV” made its appearance and I was glad that I had gotten away from the habit. Since then I’ve slowly inhaled more and more and while I still only watch an average of 7 or 8 hours a week, a chunk of that is on the Reality TV that on the one hand I think is just dumb, but on the other hand I have some morbid fascination with. The two such programs I currently watch are The Apprentice and American Idol.

The Apprentice is interesting because it is at least vaguely similar to life-like situations where you have a project to run and a team of coworkers. Of course it’s also very unrealistic because you are given lots of support on the one hand and on the other you may have no background in a given task (nor anyone on your team). Also, you don’t normally get what might be called an impossibly brief timeframe to get a project done, and then when your sales are a whopping $10 less then your competitor, you are deemed the “loser” and one of your teammates must be let go! But still, it is about making business decisions that I think most people can kind of understand based on common sense and it’s interesting to come up with what you would have done differently in order to make the project work better. Unfortunately, as with most of these shows, you only get to see what the producers want you to. They shoot dozens of hours of footage and have to bring this down to about 40 minutes. It needs to make sense, but also be entertaining, and finally it needs to not anger viewers too much when it seems obvious that Trump is making a horrible decision. Yahoo provides some extended scenes and some unaired scenes which each week probably add an additional 10-20% of footage! So you know there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t see. You can make someone look very bad or very good by selectively including or excluding a given scene, and I’m positive that the producers are very strategic about how they do this in order to portray who they want to win (or who they expect to win).

American Idol is another show that, like The Apprentice, I picked up last year just to find out what all the fuss was about. It is a nominally fun talent-show type of program, but the format has gotten pretty stale. Last year at least the contestants got to meet with some music giants like Elton John but this year it seems the venues for most weeks are just based on date ranges that the songs came out. The contestant performs, then the first judge, Randy, says “Hey Dawg, how’s it going?” and then gives what is arguably the most “real” impression of the performance. The Paula Abdul gushes about how the performance was great and in the rare cases she doesn’t like the performance she instead praises the individual instead of giving constructive criticism, although this does happen once in a blue moon. The Simon plays the evil foil and berates the performer for singing like a lounge singer, or someone at a karaoke bar, or one of the half dozen other analogies that he picks from a hat, and often complains about what the performer is dressed in. Occasionally he does praise performances, but 80-90% of the time his comments are negative and mean.

What is interesting is to see some of the discussion of people on the net that follow these two shows. I don’t get a group of friends together to watch these, being a 30-something most of whose friends are too busy with kids to bother with such trifles. My coworkers don’t seem to watch these shows either. In order to see whether others have similar impressions of the shows, I visit a couple of sites that discuss each episode. It’s interesting to get the impressions of some who are exactly what mine are, yet others who seem the diametrical opposite.

American Idol is a bit different from others in that the audience actually has a roll in the show in that they vote and their votes effect the outcome – namely who gets to leave the show each week. You can vote multiple times for as many candidates as you want and so there are some very motivated people who vote dozens if not hundreds of times for their favorites. One of the things I noticed early on in the competition which I felt wasn’t particularly fair was that back stories of certain contestants were aired while those of others weren’t. That means the audience became familiar with certain people whereas others seemed a lot less familiar and thus the familiar ones had a big edge in developing fan bases. It’s not a guarantee that someone with more initial exposure won’t make it that far and those with a lot will, but it does make these scenarios more likely. As I said, it gives an edge. If the person doesn’t take advantage of it, then it doesn’t mean much.

Anyway, this last episode of American Idol put Scott Savol, one of the contestants who have been in the “bottom 3″ for most of the competition, into the top group, despite any big improvement in his performance. This was surprising and then I heard of VoteForTheWorst.com. This is a site which is encouraging people to vote for the worst contestant (in their minds this is Scott Savol) in order to teach the American Idol producers a “lesson.” In other words, don’t try to steer or manipulate the audience into voting a certain way. So far I’ve never actually voted myself for one of these contests, but this site really does motivate me to do so. As the site says, all of these contestants are getting great exposure and will get record deals very quickly after the show ends, why must our “favorite” (if we even have one) win? Why not just make it more entertaining by voting for someone that most people think is a poor singer and performer? I have nothing against Mr. Savol. He had an arrest for domestic disturbance several years ago when he threw a phone at the mother of his son, but apparently this is something they’ve worked out and he’s expressed remorse. I don’t like judging people on stuff like this anyway, but I can judge his singing and performance at least as I experience it and my honest opinion is that he is the least charismatic, the worst performer, the worst singer and the worst communicator of the current group. As he and his parents have indicated, he’s not had the easiest haul growing up, so voting for him gives the added benefit of giving him some extra success that will hopefully allow him the freedom to do what he loves best – sing. Just as long as I don’t have to listen to his songs!

Scrubs is one of my favorite shows on TV these days. Probably the only comedy show that I watch on a regular basis. The first season of Scrubs is coming out on DVD next month so I am helping Buena Vista get the word out on my DVDMon.com site. You have a chance of winning a box set of the first season if you fill out a short survey (takes about 5 minutes) about which of five commercials you like the best and least. The nice thing is that you find out immediately if you’ve won or not. You have an additional chance of winning one if you send a link to the contest to a friend. I’ve never won a contest like this online but hopefully one of you Scrubs fans will. If you do happen to win one following the link on my DVDMON.com site, please let me know!

Matt over at PVRBlog sheds some light for those of us who use TiVo, DirecTV Satellite, and TiVo. Basically, there’s no easy way to have all three. When I bought my HDTV almost a year ago, I considered buying a satellite receiver that was both a DVR as well as an HD receiver. The only such one at the time had just come out and was selling for $1000. This was not that much less than my TV, which was already was taking some real financial courage (or stupidity) to buy. I had to hold off. A year later, that hasn’t really changed. You would have thought the prices for such items would come down, as they have for HDTV’s themselves, but this isn’t the case.

Another issue that I’ve had is with receiving local channels. If I want to get local channels in HD, I have to use an antenna. I called DirecTV about this last year and they said that I could petition for a waver. They did this for me and I got a note in my mail 6 weeks later saying all but Fox had denied my waver. The problem with this is that I have to switch the TV off of the satellite and use an antennae, and guess what, the antennae, despite being one that gets some extra power from AC, and has lots of ways to adjust it’s position, doesn’t work very well. In fact, the only network I’ve been able to receive is CBS, but it’s really a crapshoot whether I will be able to receive it on any given day. Occasionally I will be able to receive PBS signals, but like CBS, it’s a crapshoot. NBC, ABC, and Fox, forget about it. Meanwhile these channels are available in HD from local cable channels. As much as I hate the cable conglomerate that serves my area, if watching network shows in HD were critical to me, I would have to go with them as my only option.

Then again, I can’t get a Cable DVR that records in HD, so what’s the point? I would basically have to create my own DVR, which while fun, but probably wouldn’t cost all that much less than DirecTV’s $1000 unit.

Then there’s the issue of content portability. Even if there was an HD DVR available through DirecTV, Dish, or a cable provider, it wouldn’t provide content portability. What I mean by this is the ability to take the content that you are recording and archive it to DVD or transfer it to another device like your computer or personal media player. These companies are very nervous about letting the consumer have this kind of power because they are afraid that it will enable them to share recordings just as music recordings have been shared over the internet.

I’m often amazed at the ease my own solution has allowed for content portability, albeit not one that allows me to record in HD. The TiVo I own is a Humax DRT-800 which I reviewed a couple of months ago. It is one of the few out there that allow you to burn your TiVo recordings to DVD. By doing so, you can then take the DVD’s and create any open form of media file using one of the many encoding tools out there, like Dr. Divx. I did this as a test for a half-hour show which I was able to load onto a memory card on my Treo 650 phone. Because of the small screen size I was able to shrink the file size down to a puny (for video) 90MB and watch the whole show wherever I went. While it took me a while to get this working, I would guess that once I got the hang of it, I could do it in about 30-45 minutes – most of that time just being the encoding/decoding/burning processes during which I can do other things.

HD content is still something that I think most people don’t care about – besides us early adopters. Add to this the much larger bandwidth required and the ability for content providers to gum up the works by tricking legislators into thinking that HD is somehow different from other media types and so deserves some special protections. What you get is an environment that is killing the enthusiasm for HD by the very people (early adopters) who would trumpet it and encourage all their friends to become the next generation adopters. But the way that HD has been doled out as some precious commodity has only made people balk at the price they have to pay for a technology that while certain eye-catching, is simply not worth the hassle in many cases because it doesn’t offer the flexibility that standard definition does…

Well, it looks like NEC has been reading my blog, because they just created the exact device I was ranting about wanting back a couple of weeks ago. According to Gizmodo, who was able to translate their press release (I cannot currently read Japanese), they have just come out with a technology that converts analog signals to digital and transfers them at a lightning fast 1Gbps. That’s about 20 times the speed of 802.11G and apparently fast enough to transmit the large data demands of HDTV. That’s what HDTV is suggesting. I’m not sure exactly what they are suggesting in this regard, though? Are they suggesting that this product would enable an HD receiver and monitor to communicate wirelessly? If so, so what? First of all, you could just build the receiver INTO the monitor, but even if that’s not the case, you still have so many components in a hope theater that rely on all these wired connections, having one component’s connection to another be wireless seems a little pointless. What my idea was initially seems much more apropos – use this to communicate between your computer(s) and your Entertainment system. This way whatever you can play on your computer, no matter what format, can be piped to your stereo wirelessly and played at the same quality level, not the crappy FM modulation quality. Also, you could play video files you’ve downloaded onto your computer on your TV, or you could play HDTV on your computer, although I’m not sure why you would want to. I guess what you might be able to do is build your own HDTV DVR on the cheap with a PC solution, and then simply pipe the signal over to your TV, although I wonder whether the conversion to back and forth between digital and analog would degrade the quality enough to where the signal would look like standard definition? Who knows, but it seems like at least one company is thinking in the right direction.

Also, I wonder how this transmission technology would work as another Wifi technology? What’s the range? Gizmodo mentions a 60Ghz transmissions band, so this won’t be interfering with the currently way overused 2.4Ghz band.

On January 3rd, just as CES 2005 was getting under way, TiVo announced TiVo ToGo, a service they’ve been talking about for around a year now. As many of you know, this service will allow you to transfer your TiVo programs or movies to a computer, a portable media player, and eventually to a DVD. At least that’s the theory. In practice, things may be a little more complex. TiVo ToGo has an inherent problem, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is speed, both figuratively and literally:

Firstly, this feature has taken forever to get to TiVo owners. Ostensibly this was because TiVo had to allay the fears of the movie industry, TV networks, etc., by creating a DRM system whereby the content could not be easily copied and distributed. To do this, TiVo employs a code or “access key” that you type in when playing the content outside of the the TiVo box. This code is specific to you and your TiVo. If you then distribute that content on the internet, it has a signature pointing right back at you. While I appreciate that TiVo is trying to work with content providers to come up with a compromise that will help both their customers and the content providers, I think in the end this is crippling them, as TiVo ToGo was in development for at least year.

Now that TiVo ToGo has been announced, it is still going to take weeks before all TiVo boxes have the service. Some types of TiVo’s (ones that record to DVD), will not see the capability for what will probably be months. And DirecTV Tivo boxes simply will not offer the service, just as they have not offered TiVo’s home networking features.

Finally, the issue of speed is inherent in the actual functionality of TiVo ToGo. Even at the lowest quality of recording, an hour of TiVo programming takes up about 1 GB of storage. How do you get your content from your TiVo to your computer? You have to go through the USB port on the TiVo. You can either hook a wireless or wired Ethernet adapter to it, or potentially even hook it directly to a laptop. The problem, though, is that no matter what it’s hooked to, it is still a USB 1.1 port, the older type which was superseded with the ten times faster USB 2.0 around three years ago. This bottleneck means that no TiVo content can travel faster than about 4Mbps (bursts go up to 12Mbps, but average transfer speed is much slower), or about 1.8GB per hour. So, with this speed you can transfer a 2-hour movie in a little over an hour AT THE WORST QUALITY. Most people will want to record at least some content at the best quality level, which is about 4GB per hour, and this will take a whopping 2+ hours to transfer per hour of show, or somewhere close to 4 hours for an average movie. Maybe I’m spoiled, but this seems like an inordinate amount of time, and during this transfer, your computer will slow down to the speed of your computer from 10 years ago - so slow you will have to set transfers before going to sleep at night. Now if you’re transferring this to a laptop that you’re bringing with you, you can just wake up the next morning, throw the laptop in its bag and head out the door. But what if you don’t have a laptop and instead want to send your programs to a portable media player or to DVD? Well, you’re now looking at more time. Maybe another 10-15 minutes per hour of video to send to a DVD, or another 3-5 minutes per hour of video if you can transfer your files to your portable media player via USB 2.0 or Firewire. In any case, this starts to become a real hassle at some point unless you’re just transferring a couple of programs at a time. For a portable media players, you will probably also want to decrease the quality of the program even further in order to fit more onto what could be only 20GB of hard drive space, which means an additional conversion factor. TiVo does have plans to upgrade their USB to the significantly faster USB 2.0, but there is no immediate timeline, which probably means we shouldn’t expect anything until at least next year.

I happen to own one of those TiVo’s with a DVD recorder - the Humax DRT-800. I can record shows directly from the TiVo to DVD-R or DVD-RW and it takes all of 15 minutes for an hour’s show at the highest quality setting. This unit costs a bit more than an similarly sized TiVo and of course the discs cost money too, but at least the DVD-RW’s can be reused and I have much more portability (due to increased speed) than TiVo ToGo. Perhaps this is why TiVo has decided to not push their updates yet to those who own DVD recorders like the Humax.

If TiVo were to upgrade their USB functionality to 2.0, then this would become much faster and easier. However, it seems that the easier you make it to copy content, the more nervous content creators get. I think there’s actually an inherent conflict of interest between the attitudes of content creators and their customers. These companies want to be able to parcel out their content in a way that generates the most revenue as possible, and they see this being done only through commercial-filled programming, or through selling recordings on DVD or CD, or via subscription-based pipelines where part of that subscription fee is funneled back to them. Likewise, they would like for you to have to buy their content multiple times. Paying your satellite or cable company, or just paying more for products which are advertised during a program’s airing is only the first payment. If you also want to hold onto that show on a DVD, you get to pay all over again! Because the DVD format was created in order to prevent copying (albeit the scheme was subsequently defeated), you have to jump through some hoops if you want to then transfer that same content onto something that doesn’t play dvds themselves, but can play the dvd video files - like portable media players.

Music companies want you to pay for the song you hear on the radio by charging the radio network, which then compensates by getting advertisers to buy ads which in turn drives up prices for their products. Even if there are no ads, like with satellite radio, you are still paying a monthly fee, which is in part going to back to these content providers. Then if you want to have that recording at your disposal to play any time at a good quality, you need to pay an additional fee to buy it on CD, or more recently on the internet. But if you pay for it on the internet, say via iTunes, you then can only play it on a limited number of devices. Finally, if you want to hear the song as a ringtone on your phone, you are charged yet again for this same content.

TiVo’s CEO, Michael Ramsy, has finally “left” TiVo, although he is still remains as Chairman of the Board. Some believe he was pushed to leave due to the poor performance of TiVo’s stock. I’m no expert in the stock market, but I can certainly understand why TiVo’s stock has diminished in value, even with the advent of TiVo ToGo and an increased TiVo subscriber base. TiVo, it seems, took the road of trying to placate content providers and potential competitors as opposed to just going it alone. Alas, in business, or in particular in the entertainment business, this seems not to work. Instead of full cooperation for its trying not to step on any toes, the only thing it’s gotten is a lack of actual litigation. On the other hand, you have companies like NBC trying to defeat TiVo’s functionality by starting and ending shows differently then their schedules indicate. Other channels, like Comedy Central in particular, refuse to code their programs as repeats or first run, making the process of recoding a series that much more difficult. Even partners like DirectTV seem to be backstabbing TiVo. TiVo partnered with DirctTV so that they could build combo TiVo/DirecTV receivers (DirecTiVo’s as they are called) that would work in an integrated way. But now it looks like DirectTV may not be a TiVo partner in the long run as they are coming out with their own DVR that will compete not only against the TiVo hadware, but the TiVo subscription service as well.

I’m worried about TiVo’s future. That’s why I’ve refused to buy their lifetime subscription. I have no idea whether TiVo will be around in two years, when such a subscription starts to pay off, but more importantly I don’t know if TiVo will have lowered their prices or morphed into something else, or whether other options will become available that make TiVo not the best choice for me. I want TiVo to succeed, I really do, but I think that there needs to be some radical shifts in TiVo’s way of doing business:

1. First thing, as I’ve noted, is to stop kissing up so much to all the content companies. TiVo tried being nice and it hasn’t gotten them very much at all. It’s time to say “screw it!” and not try to get permission for everything they do. This has slowed down their development considerably, and caused them to fall behind some other hardware and service providers so they are no longer on the cutting edge.
2. “Placeshifting” - in other words portability - is the new key. TiVo was revolutionary in letting people “timeshift” in order to watch what they wanted when they wanted. Five or so years later, though, technology has progressed to a point where video has become more and more portable. Portable Media Devices are an up and coming device category (when Apple finally releases one, they will truly be mainstream), laptops are ubiquitous, portable DVD players have gotten incredibly cheap, and PDA’s, and even smartphones have become powerful enough to handle video. Part of making a functionality “easy” for people to use it, is to make it practicle, and speed is a big part of this. The fact that a driver update could make a USB 1.1 port into a USB 2.0 port and thus provide 10 times the speed or more, should mean that this update should be getting priority over most other projects. During this entire year between TiVo ToGo’s first being mentioned and it’s finally being released, why wasn’t part of TiVo’s resources put to updating this and if they were, what on earth could be taking so long?
3. Placeshifting in reverse - just as people want to take their TiVo’d programs with them on the road, there’s a definite need expressed to take content we get elsewhere and send it back to our TiVo so that we can play it on the larger screens in our living rooms. Already third parties have come in to allow for this kind of functionality. I see more and more of these “wireless multimedia boxes” that allow for bi-directional communication between a TV and a computer over a wirless network (using the faster 802.11G) or more direct connection. What would you send back to a TiVo? How about video clips you find on the internet that you want to share with the whole family, or content licensed in Creative Commons or Public Domain? A home video that you like to watch and share with friends a bunch of times without having to risk wearing the tape out? There are tons of reasons.
   4) Work more with hackers and third-party software developers and open functionality up to all users - TiVo has been more friendly to hackers than most companies, I’ll admit. TiVo’s are built with the Linux operating system, a favorite of hackers, and with hardware that can be removed and tinkered with fairly easily. This is great for hackers and tech-savvy people, and hackers have created programs that greatly expand the functionality of your TiVo. For example, one can basically operate one’s TiVo remotely over the internet with one such program. But just installing such programs requires some computer hardware and software skills that that probably a vast majority of TiVo owners don’t have and won’t bother to learn. TiVo needs to take these great applications and make them available as real parts of the TiVo system to all users. Maybe part of the reluctance in the past was that these programs were developed in an open-source environment that would not want TiVo to charge for them. When TiVo introducted it’s Home Networking feature, it charged for it and only after some time realized that it was not going to get enough people to pay an additional fee over TiVo’s original fee (which some people object to anyway) and until last. Maybe now that TiVo realizes they aren’t going to be able to charge additional fees for added functionality, they will offer gratis something which they are getting for very low development costs (since third-parties are developing these programs) to all their customers.

Microsoft recently started providing a version of Windows called Windows XP for Media Center Edition that provides DVR functionality, and many other companies are coming out with DVR’s, multimedia boxes, or even pumped up portable hard drives that all provide functionality that TiVo doesn’t. TiVo really needs to catch up, or they will eventually be relegated to AOL status - marketed to a diminishing pool of completely non-technical people who don’t mind paying a premium for an interface that dumbs down everything for them. I don’t think AOL is doing all that well these days. Then again neither is TiVo, or at least not according to their stock price!

The latest new feature we’ve heard about from TiVo is an high definition-capable TiVo, but apparently this won’t be available until 2006. What I want to know is what the point of such an announcement is if the product won’t be release for a year or more? Take a lesson from Apple and surprise people with new products instead of telling customers how long they will have to wait as well as notifying competitors way in advance of your plans so that they can come along and trump you - which it seems is becoming increasingly easy due to how slowly TiVo introduces new products and functionality. I personally have an HDTV and at this point my only hope is that another company like Humax will come out with an HD-compatible TiVo, preferably one with DVD-writable capability. Whether TiVo creates this or a third-party partner I guess doesn’t matter that much if customers are still going to buy a TiVo subscription. Who knows, maybe TiVo’s real purpose in announcing this so long before it becomes a reality is to actually motivate current or partners to develop their own HDTiVo’s?

What is so frustrating about all of this is that TiVo was the first out there with set-top DVR technology and so basically revolutionized how we watch TV. They’ve provided at least somewhat of a lightening rod for content companies, allowing us to just sit back and record things the way we wanted to (although this may be starting to change). Whether they go all out the way I wish they would, or simply continue to play the middle-man between the end user and the content providers, they are a major force that is at least trying to provide as much content in as flexible a way as possible to as many people as possible. If they get usurped by individual cable companies and satellite companies, this flexibility will be constrained even further since these many cable and satellite providers are also owners of much of content themselves. Microsoft, on the other hand, so far is not a major owner of content. Because of its size, it could wield real influence and be able to handle whatever litigation content companies throw at it, but it is unlikely to wage those kinds of battles. With its own music stores, DRM support, and history of monopolistic practices, it would be a shame if they were to replace TiVo as the dominant player in the DVR market.

In the end, TiVo may need to really do some radical things. It seems like they may be starting to go in this direction based on some reporting from PVRBlog about a Home Media Engine that will be in a future system update. It will theoretically provide the third-party development I talk about above. Getting this kind of software functionality added as well as providing USB 2.0, enhanced wireless speeds (802.11G or even 802.11N when it is standardized), and even some new hardware features or options (Ethernet ports, firewire, more types of audio and video input and output, more USB/Firewire ports for hot-swappable external storage, etc), will be key in keeping TiVo from becoming a has-been. TiVo should also upgrade its hardware in general which is beginning to really feel its age not being as fast to get things done as it could. TiVo has become a familiar name and even a new verb in the language, but it can’t just rely solely on this reputation and rest on its laurels.

As some of you know, I also run a website devoted to DVD news and reviews. DVDMon.com has been up now for over five years. Recently I got to review a new DVD set put out by Warner Home Video of the first season of the WB series Everwood. I thought I’d include the review here too, because in it I talk about issues around dvd releases, content distribution, and the dilemma that some of us can be faced with when we coming into a series fresh after it’s been going for a while, and still running strong:

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My TV watching has declined a lot in recent years. Part of this was due to moving in with my now wife in a condo that got bad reception and refusing to pay for the high prices of Washington DC cable. Since we moved out to the suburbs, bought a new TV, and a TiVo, we’ve been watching more, but still not large amounts. Part of my problem is that I want to be able to watch a series from the beginning. Coming in on the third season seems like coming into a movie in the middle.

Everwood was a show that I remember hearing about when it came out a couple of years ago, but at the time we just didn’t get the WB network due to poor reception. Luckily Warner Home Video, as they and others have done with many other series, have made the first season of Everwood available on DVD. So I sat down and watched all 23 episodes in less than a week! Yes, I got hooked. And of course when you have an entire season at your disposal, it’s just too easy to say “well, what the heck, let’s just watch ONE more.”

Everwood, for those who haven’t seen it, is about a famous neurosurgeon, Dr. Andy Brown (Treat Williams), whose wife dies in the pilot. Fame had to do partly due to his dedication, but this translates into being a “workaholic” especially when it means missing almost every important event in your family’s life. His 15-year-old son Ephram (Gregory Smith) despises him. He was amazingly close to his mother, but practically a stranger to his father. Delia (Vivien Cardone), Andy’s 9-year-old daughter, is still too young to have garnered anything but love and admiration for her father. Soon after the death of his wife, Andy decides to move the entire family to the small mountain town of Everwood, Colorado where he opens a doctors office where he sees patients for free. So, Ephram hates him even more for taking him totally out of his element (one which he apparently had a shakey grasp on to begin with - being somewhat of a geek-loner), and even Delia struggles to make even one new friend. The main thrust of the first season revolves around Amy Abbot (Emily VanCamp), who befriends Ephram in order to get his father to operate on her boyfriend who is in a coma. Her father, Dr. Harold Abbott (Tom Amandes), also happens to be the town’s only doctor before Dr. Brown and family come to town. His ornery, persnickety nature is only made more so by the freewheeling Dr. Brown who often displays the tunnel vision of an idealist. But Dr. Abbot is not the one-sided villain to Andy’s Hero that you would get from a predictable show. Everwood constantly surprises you by foiling those stereotypes. No one is a villain and a hero so much as they are all humans with their own flaws as well as strengths.

I think of Everwood as kind of a mutated Northern Exposure, but with a lot more family relationship stuff thrown in. Like Northern Exposure, it’s about a New Yorker (or New Yorkers as the case is) going someplace far from home where he experiences culture shock, meets lots of cute small-town characters, and becomes in integral part of the community. The family stuff, though, adds a powerful supplement to what could be seen as a formula, and the excellent writing and acting, similar to Northern Exposure, is always a valuable asset. Everwood doesn’t shy away from controversial issues like porn and abortion, and I found myself cringing a few times, which I suppose is a good thing in a way. The treatment of these issues is ultimately sensitive and multidimensional, but due to their nature if they were handled with too soft a touch, you wouldn’t get the impact that they really should have on many of us. Feeling a little uncomfortable sometimes I think shows that a show is really touching some buttons. And Everwood touches a lot of buttons, not so much because of contrived situations that make us sad, or music that helps it to tough on the heartstrings, but by some dialog that is honest and sometimes brutally so. It’s character development is such that we really understand the impact when one person does or says something to another, we feel it ourselves much more than in cardboard cut-out clichés that make up much of what TV and Cinema has become.

The DVD set comes with 6 DVD’s containing the 23 episodes. In addition to these, there is a 24-minute making of featurette that fills in some of the history of how the pilot was developed and filmed, and then subsequently how Everwood made its way through its first season. Another feature is a short clip of video that is taken first by Gregory Smith, then my Emily VanCamp - basically just candids from behind the set. Finally, there is a series of 10 or so deleted scenes both with and without a commentary track. These were helpful in giving even more insight into the characters. Apparently they often shoot more than the allotted 45 minutes for each episode and have to throw away at least a little for most episodes. So theoretically there might have been even more of these on the cutting room floor, but these give a nice enough taste of what we might have if the show were a bit longer, or without commercial breaks. Warner Brothers also provided commentary tracks for 4 of the 23 episodes - the pilot, the 5th show “Deer God”, the 20th show, “Moonlight Sonata,” and the finale, “Home.” The constants in these were the executive producers Greg Berlanti and Mickey Liddell, but Treat Williams is in most of them as well. In addition, Tom Amandes is in a couple and Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp are both in one respectively. Generally Berlanti and Lidell do most of the talking in these, although Treat Williams can get a little talkative as well. The others are generally much more quiet. I did enjoy the commentaries and they of course gave a lot of additional insight, but I do wish they would have included more of the actors and allowed those actors to talk more. Instead it seems like the most talkative of the groups got to drown out everyone else. The other thing that bothered me a little was that Treat Williams was constantly joking. It was obviously a very amiable environment on set and that was reflected in these commentary tracks, but especially when some pretty heavy scenes were being shown I would have rather not had Treat goofing about his beard or some other piece of silliness. Nevertheless, these are somewhat minor quibbles; in general I really enjoyed the commentary tracks as well as the other special features.

The first season of Everwood (I don’t know about the 2nd or 3rd), was filmed in standard 4:3 aspect ratio, although apparently they letterboxed the premier episode and the finale. Nevertheless, none of these episodes are enhanced for widescreen. The picture is still very good, although I’m hoping that future seasons get put on HD video. The sound is also quite good, and while it is a very dialog-centric series, of course, the creations of Blake Neely add a lot to the sound of Everwood.

Now the only thing I need is Everwood Season Two. This brings me to something else I wanted to write about - TV Series on DVD. As I mentioned, I’m one of those people who like to see things from the beginning and in order. Now that I’ve seen the first season of this series on DVD, I have a dilemma. Do I just read the season synopses of all the episodes from Season 2 and 3 that I’ve missed and start watching from the middle of the 3rd season? Or do I refuse to watch anything on TV at the moment and wait until Season 2 comes out on DVD? If Season 2 were out now, I would gladly buy it, or at the very least rent it. I realize that getting a whole season of series like Everwood onto DVD is a chore, let alone two seasons. And I know some of this is marketing decisions. I guess it’s figured that doling out a little of a series at a time will garner more hunger for it. But on the flipside of this is the fact that if a new viewer is created by the series making its way to DVD, wouldn’t many of those would-be new viewers (for the show in its current season) be created if all the episodes were available so that these new viewers could “catch up” completely? Maybe I’m the exception to the rule, I don’t know. Maybe I’m also a bit spoiled by my new TiVo, but my basic preference now is of course to be able to view the content that’s been produced and not have to wait for some arbitrary decision by a marketing executive. But maybe that’s just me. I had a similar dilemma with Six Feet Under. I saw the first season live, then didn’t have HBO when the second season aired, and got it back when the third season started. But the availability on DVD always lagged by a couple of seasons, so I could never catch up and get current - especially since I didn’t even have TiVo for most of this time. What I’d really love to see is for content companies to provide these shows to us in a much more flexible way. I know a lot of this has to do with being able to make money with these shows - on TV or via rentals or sales. But I would be perfectly willing to pay if it meant that I could get whatever episode of a series I wanted at any time, streamed or downloaded of the net from the content provider’s site. Hopefully these companies will get wise and offer something akin to this soon. Currently my only choice is to go look for a copy of the show online, a prospect whose legality is questionable at the very least. Offer choices and people will bite, lack of choices often cause people to create solutions for themselves - solutions that don’t make these companies any money, but only causes headaches for both the potential viewer as well as the company trying to prevent unauthorized copying of their intellectual property.

While I’m generally not a huge fan of network TV these days, there are a few shows I still enjoy watching, and lots of sporting events still are aired on local channels, local news, etc. In the spring when we moved into our new house, we bought an HDTV and an HDTV satellite receiver and I subscribed to the Local channels and the HDTV package. But of course these were two separate deals. The local channels are only standard definition. Five or so years ago when I first got Satellite where I was living at the time, local channels weren’t even an option. Luckily some laws were passed that enabled satellite providers to offer the channels in local markets. So why can’t I get them in high definition? I called my satellite provider, DirectTV, and they said they would have to submit a waiver request for me to the local channels. After several weeks, I finally got a postcard in the mail saying that all but one of the broadcast networks had turned down my application to receive their content in high definition over satellite. Why? I’m sure there’s some kind of marketing or business decision behind these regulations but for the life of me I can’t guess why. Now, it’s true, I could receive these channels “over the air” with an antennae, but my attempts to do this have so far not met with great success. At least using your standard Antennae, I am sometimes able to receive CBS and a local PBS station, but it’s hit or miss. Occasionally NBC or ABC will come in briefly. Fox has never come in at all. I suppose there are special HDTV antennaes and I could actually install something on the roof, but the point is I shouldn’t have to. It’s inconvenient if nothing else. Can someone explain why these rules exist?

I’m sitting here watching the two new episodes of The Screen Savers on my TiVo and thought I’d share some initial impressions. For those who don’t know, the network G4TechTV produces this show and a couple of weeks ago they fired a bunch of the cast in a shakeup to improve ratings. The show and the network have a somewhat notorious recent history, as I wrote about in an earlier entry.

I’m trying not to jump to conclusions too fast, but so far the chemistry just doesn’t seem to be there, or anyway the humor isn’t there or just falls flat. Maybe part of this has to do with the fact they no longer seem to have a live audience, so they are mainly just speaking to the camera. The immediate feedback from an audience isn’t there anymore. Sarah Lane, one of the shows hosts, who in previous episodes would talk a mile a minute seems to have slowed down a bit, like she’s gotten tired (or switched to decaf).

The other main impression that I’ve gotten is that they seem to be doing a lot more little stories that were featured in some of the feeds I read very recently. On Monday’s show I think they mention Engadget by name at least three times! (so at least they are siting their sources some times) Somehow I don’t remember the earlier TSS relying on the blogosphere to such a great extent.

In all not nearly as bad as it could have been, and maybe the chemistry will get a little better and the various hosts will get better about not talking over each other or interrupting each other. Hopefully they will bring back the live audience as well. I wish them only the best. Although it’s a shame that they had to dump a bunch of good people, that was the network’s decision and I refuse to blame the cast and crew for a stupid marketing strategy. Besides, TSS is the closest thing to some of the tech blogs I read that’s on TV. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but unfortunately it’s the only thing out there of its kind.