iTunes Video Store

C

clamshellibooks

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People are talking and there is a buzz that once the iPods go video, apple could make an iTunes Video Store, much like their music store, but for movies. You could purchase a movie for $9.99. and then watch it on your iPod, OR connect it to a TV to view on a big screen (like the iPod photo now). Or you could rent the movie for $4.99 and only keep it for x amount of days. Whenever the movie is due, the next time you update ur iPod, it would erase the movie. Sounds awesome and a logical step! Hope they do that! Maybe I'm just Dreaming! :D
 
most TV shows (23 minutes) ripped from tv usin divx or quicktime or snapzpro x are usualy about 160 - 200 MBs while entire seasons are 1 to 2 GB in size. and movies are usually between 700 MB to 1GB without the special features of a DVD, and up to 7 to 8GB uncompressed video and with special features.

It would be possible for an iTunes video store...not impossible but most users would have to have a broadband connection to download the movies. Unless the movie is streaming like quicktime and u have the option of saving it after it finishes loading....just an idea
 
Any movie that is 700MB to 1GB in size would have a resolution and picture on par with a bad VHS recording. I would not cough up $5 for a movie like that when I can use my "on-demand" digital cable or run down to the video store and have it for less.

It's not all about the convenience -- do you think that the iTMS would see such high numbers of transactions if their music was encoded at 64kbps or even 96kbps? We're not all about convenience nowadays: the quality has to be there -- we need to be "fooled" into thinking that what we're getting is high-quality. 128kbps is about as low as you can go in terms of encoding music. A movie at 1024kbps is getting there, but still has a noticeable loss in quality, and the resulting file size would be around 1.0 - 1.5 GB.

Broadband is perfectly capable of handling high-quality music as it stands. High-quality video, on the other hand, is around the corner, but household DSL and cable lines (which usually top out at ~3.0mb) is definitely not "up to snuff" concerning video.

I say another year, give or take. Ultra-high-bandwidth connections are being rolled out (like fiber optic 5mb - 20mb lines) that would beg you to throw video at them, but until they're widespread, it just doesn't seem feasible in my eyes.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Any movie that is 700MB to 1GB in size would have a resolution and picture on par with a bad VHS recording.
Click to expand...

I disagree. I download and watch digital anime fansubs all the time. They fit four episodes to a CD (well, it varies, but most groups shoot for 175MB per episode), and the video quality is virtually indistinguishable from DVD (actually, it looks better in many cases).

Keep in mind that MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid, etc.) is much more efficient at lower bitrates than MPEG2 (DVD). And the upcoming H.264 (MPEG4 Part 10) which will be built into Tiger will be significantly better still.

I would definitely buy and download videos online if the price were right. $10 honestly seems a little high to me, but if you can accept current new-release DVD prices (I sure can't), I guess it's a bargain. I don't like to spend more than $15 on a DVD, so I wouldn't want to spend $10 on a download (especially since you need to factor in the price and effort of burning your download to CD/DVD, because you just can't fit many movies on a hard drive). I think the prices would need to be variable for videos, really. Make the prices proportional to what you'd get in a store. e.g., $10 for new releases, $5-8 for older releases, and less than $5 for some bargain-bin titles.

Obviously, this would only be suitable for those with broadband. Colleges would probably hate it, and maybe even block it, because it would strain their connections a LOT. And Apple would need to have CRAZY bandwidth to dish out all those movies at acceptable speeds. Apple's servers are very fast right now, but their load is a lot lighter than a video store's would be.

I think now isn't the time for such a venture. They need to wait for:

1. Broadband to become more mainstream. This won't take too long.

2. The next generation of DVD players, based on MPEG4/H.264. That way they can deliver MPEG4-based video that will be playable on DVD players. Most people don't want to watch movies on their computer, so this is important, and people will want (need) to burn their movies to CD/DVD, so an iPod shouldn't be required (which, come to think of it, may might the whole thing not worthwhile for Apple).

3. Processor technology to advance. Decoding video takes a lot of processing power. Current MPEG4 is probably the lightest of the real contenders, and even it takes a lot of OOMPH. My old 450MHz G3 could barely play 640x480 content at full speed. iPods don't have that kind of power, so forget about hooking them up to a TV for playback. I'm not sure they could get such a powerful processor in an iPod without nuking battery life and exploding. At least not yet.
 
Mikuro said:
I disagree. I download and watch digital anime fansubs all the time. They fit four episodes to a CD (well, it varies, but most groups shoot for 175MB per episode), and the video quality is virtually indistinguishable from DVD (actually, it looks better in many cases).

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You do understand that cartoons use lower frame rates. They also have much smaller color palettes than live action films. These make anime a totally unreliable barometer for the storage requirements of live action films. But you know that, don't you?
 
??? Cartoons use the same frame rates as anything else: 24 - 30 fps. Sure, badly animated cartoons will effectively have less, but I've seen plenty of well-animated ones, and they look great. Modern-day anime uses quite a lot of fast motion, actually, especially in the intros. It looks great in Divx.

And it's not like I've never watched live action MPEG-4 content. I just don't watch as much, since most of it is highly illegal. It's not DVD quality, but it's pretty darn good (definitely better than VHS). And with H.264, I'm sure it would be pretty darn better. :)
 
I believe that with H.264 the possibility goes higher. However, this is dependent on if H.264 lives up to it's hype.
 
Im already over renting DVD's from a video shop. I've gone back to VHS.

DVD's are a real drag once you nearly reach the end and then all of a sudden the disc wont read. That sux bad.

I like that iPod video idea though. Bring it on.
 
Mikuro said:
??? Cartoons use the same frame rates as anything else: 24 - 30 fps. Sure, badly animated cartoons will effectively have less, but I've seen plenty of well-animated ones, and they look great. Modern-day anime uses quite a lot of fast motion, actually, especially in the intros. It looks great in Divx.

....
Click to expand...
Before you post comments like this again, read this.
 
Having recently acquired a HDTV, I doubt I'd find a downloaded video acceptable unless it was HD quality. I have a hard enough time lately accepting DVD based movies...it's sad that we get better quality video from the local PBS stations now over the airwaves (traditional antenna, no cable/satellite) than we get with a DVD. And those stations are broadcasting 4 to 6 sub-channels, which limits the quality a bit.


  • VHS: MPEG1 (NTSC) = 352 x 240 @ 30fps
  • TV: (NTSC) = 640 x 480 @ 30fps
  • DVD: MPEG2 (NTSC) = 704 x 480 @ 30fps
  • HDTV: MPEG2 (ATSC) = 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps

A standard DVD image (NTSC/MPEG2 = 704 x 480) is a hair over a 1/3 of a megapixel, per frame. An HDTV image (1080i = 1920 x 1080) is a hair over 2 megapixels, per frame. You can image what that would do to a movie's size, H.264 or not.

I don't see it being feasible...most people probably won't want anything less than DVD quality, and within the next 5 years probably won't want anything less than HD quality. I think I'll stick to the other options.
 
I would be happy if they upgraded the bit rates of the current music store before they got into the video business. Even if an iPod video comes out, which I doubt, it would probably be some time after that before a video store would come out. Think of all the legal issues they would have to overcome, which of course is possible but takes a long time.
 
The question is whether it _needs_ to be full HDTV resolution. DVD resolution is quite acceptable for most users, anyway. And you _can_ use MPEG-4 (XviD, for example) or H.264 to create a DVD resolution movie file of 700-1000 MB without losing much quality (really!).

But why start with whole movies? Music videos would seem like a good starting point. Or TV shows.

And I'm pretty sure Apple has given this some thought with H.264. It really _does_ change these things...
 
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