iLove Video for PC users

[Liz21]

Hi! Several of my friends, PC Users, have not been able to see the QuickTime iLove videos, because, d'oh, they don't have QT. OK, I know they should download QT (and iTunes, right?), but some of them are obstinate So I was wondering, should the tech guys consider having the videos available for Windows Media Players?

[Jason]

Tell them to download VLC. It can play m4v movies and lots of other stuff.

[Liz21]

Well, yes, I can ask them to do that. But, some of my friends are too lazy to do it. That's why I'm wondering if JPOD couldn't accomodate them. However, come to think of it, that might be a lot more work for JPOD, right? (Saving to another format)

[Jason]

If your friends are too lazy to take the couple of mintues to download and install VLC, then they've got much bigger problems than just not being able to watch the videos...

If you have the original source video, it's not that difficult to save it to another format. But you have to take into consideration things like file size vs quality and compatibility across different OSes. MP4 handles both nicely. The whole point of releasing video in a cross-platform format is that you only have to provide one file. Even though it's not *that* much more effort to save in another format, it takes time to save and to publish it online. That's time that could be much better spent doing other things.

[Solvi]

I think VLC is a great program, very useful for watching all kinds of movie files. I'd definetely recommend installing it!

...it even lets me watch the Smurfs...

[Airth]

Hey Jason, thanks for the VLC tip. I've never rated Quicktime, and ever since they 'improved' the quality it has been impossible to watch anything in the MP4 format on my lowly computer. I've fiddled around with re-saving into other formats and trying out QT alternatives, but to no avail; iLove and movie trailers always stutter along for 10 seconds before coming to a grinding halt. VLC is the first program I've come across that can playback MP4 without any hitch whatsoever; why Apple can't get their Quicktime player to do the same is beyond me. Thanks again.

[atomsk]

I think QT is just used to make the videos available for ipod. I too have problems with playback in iTunes on PC. And thats a amd64 with 2GHz.

If you consider encoding the videos in another format then I recommend Flash Video (.flv like on youtube). Everybody can play them in their browsers.

[Jason]

Well, the problem with that is iTunes can't play flv, at least not to my knowledge. Since iTunes is jpod's main distribution outlet, releasing the videos in a format it can't play isn't a very good idea. They did post one of the videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GYcyArGWr4). Maybe they could upload the others too.

But, yes. The trade off with having better quality compression is causing a bigger strain on the computer. [geek]The reason is that a compressed media file doesn't actually contain the media, but a representation of the media that can later be used to reconstruct the original media (or close to it). This representation isn't playable directly, so your computer/device has to first process it and produce an uncompressed audio and/or video stream that it can directly send to the video and audio hardware. A more sophisticated method of converting the original media into the compressed representation can give you better quality for the file size, but to play it back you have to undo the sophisticated method that you compressed it with. So the expensive of a better quality/file size ratio is usually an increase in CPU and/or memory usage.[/geek]

But atomskさん if you're having problems on a machine like that, there might be something else going on that's slowing you down. You shouldn't have any problems power wise. My Macbook Pro has no problems with a 2.16GHz CoreDuo and 2GB of RAM. That's both in Mac OS X and WinXP. What version of iTunes are you using? The first release of the PC version 7.0 was absolutely horrible. 7.0.1 (or 7.1?) fixed a lot of the horrible slowdown problems. Have you tried using VLC?

Also, mmmmm 64 bits. Actually, come to think of it, that could possibly be the problem. I don't think there's a 64-bit version of iTunes out there. Depending on what kind of emulation/whatever layer a 32-bit app has to go through to run on the amd64, it may have an impact on the speed of the app. I'm not very familiar with all these new 64-bit thingies though, so I'm not sure.

[Jason]

No, discount that last idea. Just found this on Wikipedia:

Long Mode: The intended primary mode of operation of the architecture; it is a combination of the processor's native 64-bit mode and a 32-bit/16-bit compatibility mode. It is used by 64-bit operating systems. Under a 64-bit operating system, 64-bit, 32-bit and 16-bit (or 80286) protected mode applications may be supported.

Since the basic instruction set is the same, there is no major performance penalty for executing x86 code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd64#Oper ... xplanation