Matt Meyer

For tech toy freak I am, it’s surprising to many that I do not own an iPod.  In fact, I had never even touched one until two weeks ago when I was traveling trough the mountains to Taos, NM when my friend asked me to pick something from his collection.  It took a few seconds of dorking around with the device before I realized how the Click Wheel worked, but after I grasped Apple’s navigation method, it was incredibly simple to browse his collection and find an album we both enjoyed.  “This menu system is impressive,” I thought, but not nearly as impressive as the iPod accessory called iTrip that was plugged into the Dock Connector.  The iTrip, a small device by Griffin Technology, is a FM transmitter that allows the iPod to transmit over FM frequencies.  This fantastic little accessory allows you to play your favorite tracks from your iPod on any FM radio.  How cool is this?  At this point I was very intrigued so I set off to Apple’s web site to do some homework.

Upon reaching the site I found the newest member of the iPod family, the iPod photo.  This little baby allows you to hold both music and images.  It also includes a full color display which was nice since I was not impressed with the colorless LCD of the standard iPod.  Using iTunes, you can easily sync your photos to the iPod photo just as you would sync your music with a standard iPod.  The only thing that I found to be a drag was the lack of an integrated media reader.  In RAW format, my Nikon D70 devours CompactFlash cards and it would be great to copy over the photos from the CF card to the iPod without any external device like the Belkin Media Reader.  Even without an integrated media reader, it’s still nice to know it’s possible to use the iPod as a portable storage device when on vacation.  Over the last six months, the price for flash memory has dropped by about half, but it still does not compare to the price per MB of the iPod.

I think I have found my portable, all-in-one solution, that will not only allow me to hold days of high-quality music, but I can also forget about filling up my CF cards when on vacation.  All these great toys are getting my gears turning, which leads me to iPod video.

Though not announced by Apple, I cannot imagine this is too far off.  Apple has already announced that QuickTime 7 will use the H.264 codec which was chosen as the industry-standard for 3GPP (mobile multimedia), HD-DVD and Blu-ray.  H.264, aka AVC, is the going to be one of the hottest topics for video professionals in 2005.  H.264 is the newest member of the MPEG-4 standard and produces stunning video quality at half the bitrate of MPEG-2.  Unlike MPEG-2 where higher bitrates and resolutions are needed to produce acceptable results, H.264 delivers excellent quality from bitrates as low as 56 Kbps all the way up to 8000 Kbps.  For more information about H.264, Apple has written a great FAQ found here.

Let me try to put some of this into simple English; I want to be able to watch movies on an iPod…period.  With the incredible compression rates produced by H.264 without sacrificing quality, you will get about 60 minutes of high-quality video with stereo sound and it will only take about 75 MB of storage.  That’s over 500 hours of video on a 40GB model.  You read that right, 500 hours.  Are you getting the picture now?

To add a cherry to this delicious sundae, Apple could work with the movie and television studios and offer downloadable movies and TV shows just as they do music today.  They could even incorporate a Digital Rights Management system so the downloaded file will only play on your device and could not be shared (not shared easily anyway) with others.  At only 150 MB for your average movie, this is not a very large download for broadband customers and it’s a whole new market for Apple.

Think about this the next time you are out shopping and your wife wants to go look at some shoes.  She tells you, “It’s only going to take a second,” but you know better.  If you had an iPod video you could sit outside the store and watch an episode of a TV show or movie you downloaded from Apple’s site.  When your wife returns with a smile after finding a great deal on yet another pair, you have just finished watching a very funny scene from your favorite movie.  Suddenly shopping is fun again.