YouTube hits Apple TV today, headed for the iPhone as well – Engadget
The wait is over, and you can finally train that Apple Remote of yours on videos of passable karaoke, mind numbing video blog confessions and the genius that is Daxflame. That’s right, YouTube is hitting the Apple TV today, an announcement that is totally overshadowed by a little surprise Apple packed into the press release: YouTube is the iPhone mystery app. Sure, it might not be GPS or anything useful like that, but Apple seems to be aware of our addiction and is happy to oblige. YouTube videos can be viewed through an Apple-built application on the phone, and will be encoded in H.264 by YouTube to improve video quality and battery life on mobile devices. They’ll have 10,000 videos ready by June 29th, and should complete transcoding the collection by this fall. Videos can be viewed over WiFi or EDGE, we don’t want to even imagine the painful load times of the latter.
I’m not too excited about the feature for the iPhone (since I wont be getting one) but I’m just about to check out YouTube on AppleTV and I’ll get a review up soon.
This is just in time for the summer TV blues where the only show some stations has to offer is horrible contest shows. But I’m still waiting for a real IPTV solution from Apple, hopefully Joost or Google will help because pay-per-show isn’t cheap, nor good enough quality.
After just a few days of using the Apple TV I’m thoroughly impressed. The major reason I purchased the Apple TV was because of all the hacking that’s been going on and with Apple practically saying, “it’s your box do what you will” we can expect some more great hacks, if running full OS X wasn’t enough. I had planned at least to install some Xvid/divX playback through a very simple hack but involves cracking the case open. Instead of jumping right into doing that I’ve instead planned to just use it as intended.
I already live out of iTunes so the unsupported codec didn’t pose a big problem. All my TV Shows have already been encoded for iPod playback so 90% of my video was ready for use. The other 10% had been movies I ripped to DivX to playback on your Heleos DVD player. I truly dislike re-encoding video especially when the original format is already compressed (divX) but I tested out a few conversions and they looked great.
It took me a day or two to export 30-40 movies straight from Quicktime through the “Apple TV” export setting on my MacPro and I’m positive that exporting this much video isn’t practical for the majority. Especially since my assumption would be the majority having more video than I and wouldn’t have a fast pc or mac that could export 10 videos at a time.
After getting all my video to a codec that the aTV supported the device shines. The one problem I have now is whether to export my future video for iPod or aTV. It should be easy since I’m not getting rid of cable anytime soon so I’ll just export any full HD downloads for the aTV (like Lost or Sapranos), otherwise all other TV downloads will go for my iPod which I use daily at work. And all movies will be exported through QT Pro or if it’s a DVD I’ve found ripping it straight to from handbrake is the ideal process.
Quality of converted HD content looks surprisingly good. I downloaded a full HD tv show and converted it’s original format to h.264 through QT pro. After streaming it over wireless, on a g network might I add the video looked great. I didn’t notice any difference in quality from the original format of HD DivX playback on my computer then through the aTV.
Another majorly mentioned drawback to the aTV is streaming HD over wireless. Some say that anything lower then a n network wont work but I’ve got a G network streaming video perfectly fine with about 5 seconds of beginning buffer and solid fast forwarding. It takes forever for iTunes to sync with it in the beginning since it sends 30+GBs of data but ever since I’v had no need to drop a cable.
In conclusion the aTV doesn’t have any drawbacks (for me), other then the minor process of waiting 30-50 minutes for converted HD downloaded video to be supported. And it’s wonderful not having to worry about burning DivX cds or finding a CD/DVD to play some kid video. With it’s simple interface we can pull up a full media library from upstairs on our TV in seconds.
Including in that library is podcasts, photos and images. Watching video podcasts is great. I only wish now that I had a faster internet connection so I can drop cable TV and just download all our HD shows to playback on the aTV. Or what would help, HD content downloads from iTunes.
I’ll still be following the Apple TV hacking scene and I’m sure they’re going to compel me to break the box soon.In the meantime I’ll order a new 2.5′ drive so I can keep the factory drive untouched.
I love it when Jared is wrong, maybe not entirely wrong but his assumptions that Apple embraces DRM as much as MS is wrong.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
There are some articles floating around and some unhappy bloggers calling out the big N’s lack of SD support for the Wii and I’d like to point out a few things.
One, SD cards didn’t even work when the system was launched. It took a system update for just backing up to SD cards to … Read More »
January 05
Looks like the community is getting a new version of Handbrake to support 640x H.264 and the news got out even though it’s not a final release and users are warning people not to use it.
But I still don’t get the big deal with H.264. Even thought I need to go through this post and make it more simple and fix a few errors I’ve fully shown that H.264 isn’t all that. You’ll see the file size is nothing to get too excited about when you can get higher resolutions and larger bitrates from the standard MPEG4 format which will also play on your iPod. Yes, 20% file size reduction (without factoring in the lower resolution) may sound like a lot but when you are talking about movies that take a long time to encode it’s easier to find more storage then to convert the movie/TV show again when your non iPod device can’t play H.264 or software that can’t use it.
The new iPod video formatting is extremely hard to follow and hopefully this review will help. I created it because I just wanted to put the highest quality video on my 5g video iPod for playback on a TV.
The first hurdle was finding the app that would rip my DVDs to H.264. I used Instant Handbrake (with the unofficial icons of course) in the past, but as you might know it rips the DVDs in the old file size of 320×240, half the resolution as the new 640×480. The full version of Handbrake does allow for h.264 encoding at higher resolutions but not at with the supported Baseline Low-Complexity Profile encoding for it to be compatible with the iPod. So my search started.
Both VisualHuband Video2Go misled me into believing they would rip DVDs into H.264, they simply don’t. VisualHub doesn’t have the functionality and Video2Go only rips unprotected DVDs. So don’t bother.
Hawkeye is the only application I know of that can properly rip and encode DVDs in the baseline low-complexity profile. Not only is the application easy to use the support is wonderful and I would like to review it but it’s simply the only solution out there for H.264 LBE at 640x. It will be the application I use to rip DVDs to H.264 in order to compare them MP4 formats. One thing I would like to see come out in the next update is a queueing, having a Mac Pro with Dual drives Handbrakes makes it easy allowing me to back-up 2 DVDs per setup.
H.264 isn’t the only thing iPod plays, Mpeg4 is the other alternative. And for ripping DVDs to Mpeg4 the best solution is Handbrake. It’s widely used and highly documented and reviewed. In the comparisons below this will be the app I use to encode to Mpeg4.
It’s not really fair to compare the two directly because H.264 is limited to 640x where as Mpeg4 is not. Believe it or not the iPod will play 720x ripped straight from Handbrake at bitrates higher then 2k. But what about all the hype surrounding H.264? H.264 increases the quality of video at low bitrates; the blacks are darker, it produces less artifacts increasing detail with decreased file size. H.264 is superior to Mpeg4 in every way but in the tests below I had to compare Mpeg4 720x vs. H.264 640x because I wanted the maximum quality for iPod playback on a TV out.
H.264 encoded at a bitrate of 1600, single pass. 640x
H.264 encoded at a 1600 bitrate, 2pass. 640x
Mpeg4 encoded at a 2000 bitrate, 2pass. 720x
Important!: Click through to the full resolution grabs.
In this comparison you’ll notice there is a huge difference in detail. The two areas of notice are the fur and the snow.
Below I’ll compare the same resolutions but different formats at different bitrates.
H.264 encoded at a 1600 bitrate, 2pass. 640x
Mpeg4 encoded at a 2500 bitrate, 2pass. 640x
You’ll notice little difference in these two images except for the floor looking better in H.264 and the walls looking more detailed in Mpeg4. Not a great quality comparison since the bitrates are so spread but both bitrates are what you generally want from each format. H.264 around 1400 and Mpeg4 around 2000.
Below the comparison is strictly to show the quality of picture to justify the extra file size.
Mpeg4 encoded at a 2000 bitrate, 2pass. 720x
Quick file size comparison on Monsters Inc., Duration 1:32 :
Mpeg4, 2000 bitrate, 720×400 = 1.36 GB
H.264, 1500 bitrate, 640×352 = 1.07
H.264, 1000 bitrate, 640×352 = 896 MB
With H.264 being 10% smaller in resolution you only see a 20% decrease in file size. Worth it?
Conclusion, In my tests Mpeg4 is the best solution by far. H.264 is smaller but what you gain in space you loose in quality. There is no reason to encode all of your DVDs in a lower quality only to go back and do it again when Apple releases another iPod that can do H.264 at proper DVD quality. What I’ve done and plan on continuing is ripping all my DVDs at full resolution at a high bitrate producing almost 1:1 quality transfers. Because you’ll always be able to use Mpeg4 and more importantly you can use them now.
Let’s start with Quicktime Pro. Although you cannot rip DVDs through Quicktime you can convert all of your other Xvid, DivX and .avi files (with the right compnents and downloads) with Quicktime Pro. Apple provides a great tutorial here. I would recommend Quicktime Pro for other reasons not related to iPod conversions but it does cost $29, relatively cheap but relatively expensive if you prefer free. I’d also recommend that you don’t just rip your DVDs in Handbrake and then convert them in QTP; be ready for artifacts galore if you intend to do that.
A free alternative to Quicktime Pro for for Video Conversions is iSquint and up until the resolution updates I had used it exclusively for encoding. Once iSquint is updated I’d recommend using it over Quicktime Pro and if you’d rather wait, perfect. Because I haven’t even gotten to DVD ripping.
FFmpegX although free and now able to encode in H.264 with LBC I just haven’t tested it, I’ve used it in the past and it worked great so if you can get around having to download a few components I’d recommend this as the best app to use in converting your pre-existing video files for your 5G ipod since it’s free.
Find the best deals on new mp3 players. Get customer ratings and professional price comparison. Get the latest in mp3 technology legal debates and who really pays the price for free music.
A 5x performance advantage over the CPU isn’t the kind of thing that will be leapfrogged by dual-core CPUs and multithreaded encoders, or by any CPU released for some time. Every manufacturer of video transcoding software should be absolutely beating down a path to ATI’s door right about now, figuring out how it can add that “GPU acceleration” checkbox to … Read More »
November 17
If I could only get the stinking video to render correctly it get the video on the web for you to view. But I am having a lot of troubles, not with Apple Quicktime, but with the format of the original copy.
The problem: MPEG-2 cannot be converted to Quicktime directly, either through Final Cut, Premiere (PC) or Quicktime Pro(mac or PC). For some reason it just won’t render the audio.
My options:
Bad:
Having to transfer the video to a mac to do the encoding through Export2QT, which turns out to be very fast at encoding the media.
It wouldn’t take too much time to do but it would be tedious.
Good:
Control, even though it would take more time then having an application do it for me I would know exactly what is going on if something broke down in the process. Especially since I would be doing it at home; I would hate to have to go to the bridge to try to re-initiate/error correct.
Good:
FREE
FAST, not only would there be no render time but it would be easy to create an automater workflow to upload the files to the server or even have Jared create a program that would upload and post it to WordPress.
Bad:
Will need another dedicated machine to capture the video. At theB we have a mac mini that could possibly do this but the times we need it for iChat AV we would have to do option 1.
As you can tell I don’t really know what I am going to do because we have to capture in MPEG-2 and I need to get h.264 for the VideoCasting.
Also, going with another codec for the video cast is just not an option. I know I may seem like an Apple geek right now but the only reason I had to start doing Pod/Videocasting was because iTunes did it all, letting me, for the first time, deliver media to the masses without being tech support. Dealing with questions/explanations on how to use bittorrent, DivX, or any other superior possibility is something I cannot do. Honestly, we live in a one click world, and iTunes is the only thing that can do one click audio/video delivery for the user.
I am so excited right now. I just found out that iTunes now supports videocasting.
This changes so much, not only am I going to push for VideoCasting at the Bridge but I will most likely get this going for my work too. It’s just too easy now. Wordpress already has the ability to include enclosures in it’s rss feeds and iTunes; just too damn easy for the user.
For the Bridge we have to get our sound recordings pushed to podcasting first. They supposedly have been on the web for a while so it should have been done already. I just iChated with Greg and he loves it, he has some great ideas; all secrets.
Video will be a chore but all I need to do is delegate it to someone, right? My plan: encode to h.264, upload it to my server, post it on a WP site…is that it? I wonder if I could create an automater workflow to do this automatically…oh wait..windows…ahhh.
