Digital Trends

Apple iPod Video 60GB October 19th, 2005 | by Ian Bell

We installed the latest iTunes and prepared ourselves for rich video goodness. Before we proceed, we just want to warn you that these video downloads, especially of the television shows, are large in file size. Don’t even think about attempting this with dial-up. First, we downloaded the pilot premiere of Night Stalker and prepared ourselves for an evening of mini-madness. Since Apple takes the commercials out of these shows, the run length is about 45 minutes. It took us about 30 minutes to download the show when connected to the Internet using a cable modem, but that could be due to demand, this is the new iPod introductory week after all.

Playback on the new iPod looks fantastic; picture colors and contrast seem to be right on in terms of picture quality. The screen produces a little glare, but it’s not nearly as bad as the Zen Vision or Sony PSP. It’s also very easy to see the video being played from an angle, something the Zen Vision really struggles with. The new iPod supports the following video formats (and these are cut-and-paste from Apples website): H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 KHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats. The magic number here is the 30fps (frames per second) spec. This means that video looks fluid and natural when played back. Just to give you an idea of the competition, the Cowon iAudio X5 can play back video at up to 15fps. Video fluidity seems to be on par with the Creative Zen Vision which we reviewed a short while back. Creative has done a good job hiding this magic number from their website, although we suspect it is also near 30fps.

Those of you with a library filled of Divx or Xvid encoded movies are out of luck, since those formats are not supported; the Creative Zen Vision would be the product for you instead. If you want to try and move your existing video library over to the new iPod, you will have to find conversion software to do the trick for you. Apple’s QuickTime Pro software will convert some file formats for you, and would probably be your best bet. Another good bet would be Creative’s Media Source software which you might be able to download from their website. We got mixed results converting DivX files. We found that some of our DivX encoded videos (encoded in DivX 5 or earlier) would converted just fine, while others would not convert at all. The problem with converting video is that there are so many different formats, audio and video, and versions out there that unless you make your own DivX video files with codecs that you know will convert to play on the iPod correctly, you take a gamble each time. iTunes does not include any sort of video conversion features, but hopefully in the future there will in the future. 

The Universal Dock and A/V cables let you output video to a television, but you are still limited to a 320x240 resolution which looks terrible on newer wide screen televisions. In fact, the videos downloaded from iTunes only looked good on the iPod’s screen due to its small size. This just solidifies the theory that Apple is not really interested in competing with Microsoft on the Media Center front just yet. Let’s hope that Apple decides to tackle that bear in the future.

It can be hard watching video on the iPod for a long period of time, so if you have a PC around, we recommend you watch the shows on it instead. Imagine having to hold a 2.5-inch screen close enough for you to see it, for a long period of time. It can be taxing on your eyes and your arms. 

Audio quality is what you have come to expect from Apple. Nice crisp and clear sound is still being produced by this little wonder. The included ear buds do a great job for the casual listener, but for audiophiles, you will want your own set of golden cans.

Battery life on our Apple iPod was pretty good. During music playback we got pretty close to 20 hours of battery life. This dwindled though during our video playback tests and we were close to about 2 hours (30GB version), but that’s basically because the screen is lit up the whole time while the videos are playing. If you are experiencing different battery life rates, please post a user review, we would love to hear from you.