Bought the iPhone

Yes, I got sucked into buying the new 8GB iPhone about 10 days after it’s debut. My plan was just to try it out, claim that it was a miss and then return it sans 10% restocking fee. Gotta say that my plan went out the window as soon as I turned it on.

The iPhone is truly awesome. It’s the phone+iPod+mobile mail+browser I’ve dreamt about for 10 years. It’s pricey but worth every cent. It’s my new interface against the world – world wide. It makes the Crackberry look ancient and Neanderthal.

It’s the last piece that will make me 100% mobile and a complete road warrior. I like!

New Ripping Software

MediaFork is a new DVD ripping software based on the good old Handbrake code. It’s still Handbrake but tigther and more devloped. And available for Mac, Win and Linux.

Note: Having problems with getting the forked media files to work on the iPod. Reverting to good old Handbrake.

Get Your Apple Rumor On

You really have to love the Apple rumors. This time there are whispers about a special event on February 20. So here is my wishlist:

1. Early delivery of the Apple TV
2. A bigger, horizontal screen for the iPod (120GB)
3. Cheaper movie prices ($5.95 would be disruptive)

Countdown to Job’s Keynote

This years MacWorld is just a few hours away. As per tradition it will start with Job’s keynote where he unveals the company’s new products. We have been promised an iTV to make the home entertainment system from Apple complete. There are also rumors about the iPhone and a new video iPod with larger, horizontal screen.

The iTV is expected to bring rich media from the computer to the TV screens across the house to connect the iTunes service with the living room. It needs to do far more than a video iPod does today for anyone to cough up the suggested $300.

I’d like to see the FrontRow interfaced displayed on each screen, a remote, streming movies from the central harddrive et cetera. It would also be cool if the set-top box automatically synced with iTunes and all the rich media subscriptions I have.

But it could also be a DVR, recording the favorite shows just like a Tivo and storing them in H.264 format on the set-top box. In less than 2 hours we’ll know.

The Next iPod?

The latest rumor is a release in December ‘06.

It’s Showtime

Finally, Apple’s ‘It’s Showtime’ fall product announcement is over. The new products and services are out for review. You can find the full list of new products and services at CrunchTech. But here is my review of what I thought was really cool:

• The movie downloads: Very cool and far superior than Amazon’s Unbox but I’d have preferred rentals. That said, I’ll shop for old classics.
• The iPod 80GB: Great with an additional 20GB but I’d hoped for 20GB more and FrontRow for the iPod.
• The iTunes 7.0: The new media libraries makes it easier to keep track of the different media formats and enables movie and TV-show tagging. The iPod synching preference update makes it possible to pick individual movie or TV-show. It’s a leap and will save iPod space. But when do we get the “Import DVD” feature.
• The increased download quality from 320×240 to 640×480 is awesome. Harder to realize than most people think.
• The promise of iTV – a wireless set top box for the TV – is awesome. I’ll buy it unseen.

All-in-all, I think this announcement was the best in a long time (+1 years). It really confirms where Apple is moving: into the living room. I’m also glad the the long-rumored iPhone didn’t materialize.

That said, I won’t swing by the Apple store for another few months since I have most of the hardware I need and don’t want to pay for the incremental upgrades. Spending money on iTunes is another story. Since Apple introduced TV-shows a year ago we have cancelled our cable and now solely watch paid for, downloaded TV-shows from iTunes on our big LCD screen or on our travels.

The cost-benefit is high: no ads, no appointment viewing, portable and free choice for less than a monthly cable subscription. You only pay when you use the service and it’s accessible from anywhere in the world. Eat that AT&T.

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Cracking the Code – Downloadable Movies

So Amazon won the first-to-market race of offering downloadable movies for purchase and rent. Their service was introduced last Thursday and it’s called Unbox Movie Downloads. Every video download comes with a DVD quality movie and compressed video files for the portable player. The inventory is very random and still very small. You’ll also need the Amazon Player to watch the movies. I couldn’t test the service properly since they only offer it to Windows users.

On Tuesday Apple is doing their big ‘Showtime’ announcement. The rumor is that they will be offering downloadable movies for purchase and maybe rentals. The have a huge advantaged over Amazon by already having a great and well distributed ecosystem.

With both Amazon and Apple offering downloadable movies a Netflix offering won’t be far away. They have a huge user base, a great community and the best postal DVD service there is. The challenge for them is to figure out how to charge for downloadable movies while keeping their current profitable business alive and kickin’. Getting your DVD rentals via snail mail is very convenient and cheap ($1 per movie compared to Amazon’s $1.99-$3.99).

The next big challenge – which some people think Apple will solve – is how do I transfer my downloaded movies from my PC (or Mac if you will) to my living room. The easiest way to do it from iTunes today is to use the video iPod as a hard drive connected to the TV. But that is very limiting: no browser interface, max 60GB of storage and the need for syncing. Another option is to buy the new Mac Mini for $800 and connect that to the TV-screen. Pricey, but it works really well.

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Are Movie Downloads the Next Killer App?

Downloading movies differs greatly from music as I think the general public will soon experience if the BusinessWeek rumor of Apple’s mid-September movie download service will see the day of light.

Buying music is cheap, quick and practical. A music file is about 3-5MB, cost $0.99 and can be ported to all different devices with a click of a button. Or just consumed on the computer while working, writing, playing games or doing homework. Music is also something that you listen to over and over again.

Movies are a different kind of beast all together. A movie file is about 100-200MB (TV-show) and 700MB (full-length movie) and that is compressed, i.e. the quality you can expect from iTunes. A movie is not as easy to port to other devices: no fun to watch on a PC (maybe on a laptop while traveling) and the current iPod is too small. That means that the iPod interface for the TV needs to be improved as well as the storage capacity. Plus people need to learn how to connect the iPod to the TV via the AV-cable. That’s not a small task knowing that few consumers knows how to use their DVD-player.

Furthermore, a movie bought via iTunes will cost you $14.99 to watch once (which is what most people do) and cannot be resold (as DVD’s can). That makes the cost-benefit not that attractive. So what are the benefits? Well, I can only think of two: already digitized and almost instant. But so far only Disney has signed up.

The killer would be movie downloads as unlimited rentals. Paying, let’s say $1 per movie or $25 for an unlimited monthly subscription. In addition to this you could get discounts on buying the movies you’d like to own and watch more than once (LOTR, Star Wars, Old School et cetera).

But, in the case that Apple insists on carrying through with this mission, here are a few pointers:

- The iPod must get a bigger screen (horizontal, maybe?) for portable viewing.

- The storage would need to be bumped up to at least 100GB to hold both music and movies.

- iTunes needs to make it easier to ripp, compress and store movies. Today that whole process is manual. Ripping brings an important value to the table: getting consumer used to handling digital rich media.

- The iPod needs to display a Front Row like interface on the TV screen to make it easy to browse the media on the iPod via a remote.

Think about it, the iPod could be the next generation DVD player!

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Pushing The iPod To It’s Limits

I’m continuing to run into challenges with our fantastic 60GB video iPod. The initial problem I needed to solve was:

a) to ripp my own DVDs so that they would work on the iPod

b) get that content tagged correctly for the relevant category (Movies, Music Videos or TV-show)

c) enable only a selection of the individual categories to be updated on iPod (60GB is not enough for storing all my movies)

I understand that Apple, at this point in time, do not want to encourage people to use iTunes or iPod for their own – ripped – video media. Both iTunes and the iPod are optimized for music with the possibility of watching shorter TV-shows. Using it for movies wasn’t in the specs as I understand it. It might very well be when / if Apple starts to offer movies for sale or rent. In the meantime, they seem to rely on the third party developer community. Which works – fairly ok!

Challenge a) was solved by using Handbrake. Challenge b) by using Parsley is Atomically Delicious. Challenge c) was tricker. There is no option for type of media in the iPod preferences, only selected playlists. The solution is therefore to create a playlist called ‘video’ and manually drag’n'drop all video media that you want on your iPod into that playlist. That way you get your favorite vidoes transferred to the iPod and automatically ending up both as a playlist and per category.

My preferred solution would be to slice’n'dice my music and video files any way I’d like to: genre, artist, moviestar, latest download, not yet viewed content et cetera. This would make the synching with the iPod much faster and more seamless. At least as long as I need to choose what I want on my iPod due to it’s limiting 60GB.

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Displaying the iPod Interface on the TV?

I have just one complaint with the latest Universal Dock from Apple and that is that it doesn’t display the whole iPod interface on the TV (using the remote volume, fwd, bwd, pause and play are shown). The key to me is to be able to visually – from the sofa – see what I’m browsing when selecting media. There are other solutions that does (HomeDock Deluxe and Griffin) but they are a) expensive ($150+) and b) only handles the music, not the movies. It would not be that hard for Apple to include an iPod version of the Front Row or just beef up the current Universal Dock to include the interface on the TV.

So why don’t they?

- Would compete with the Front Row enabled new Mac Mini as a media center? Nah, the Mac Mini is much more prowerful, with more storage and with the capability to record TV-shows, via PVR software. In addition to being a computer, that is.

- Waiting until the Gen 6 iPod with horizontal video screen? Possible, that would really elevate their offering and making the video Ipod the default standard, pretty much killing the whole portable DVD market.

- Focus and priorities? Yeah, a big corporation needs to keep their eyes on the ball.

- A need that has grown recently, through usage? Very likely. Consumption patterns change through usage of new products. The mobile phone changed the way we communicate and the video iPod the way we watch movies, or is about to.

In the meantime, I’d appreciate an iPod plugin that could solve this problem.