« Which was your favorite Kiss Solo Album? | Main | World Cup Detours »
March 15, 2006
Online Video downloads
I spent some time playing around with a few online video download/purchase sites. I played with an iPod and two or three devices in the Microsoft PlaysforSure camp.
the iPod/iTunes combo -- the video content is still buried in iTunes -- it is still all music with a little TV show (new!) icon leading you to the video content. The selection is still rather limited in genres like sports and kids . The TV show selections are starting to fill out nicely; too bad I don't watch any TV. I also transfered some 20 to 30 second personal movies I created with my digital still camera. I have a Minolta DimageXi which captures directly to QT. Even then, I had to convert them to playback on the iPod. The metadata for content purchased from iTunes is starting to be richer with TV shows having entries such as Season and Episode filled out (again, too bad I don't care about TV content).
Vongo -- vongo is the latest online service to hit the market and is created by Starz. Vongo forces you to download a huge application (XP only) which serves as a front-end to their online service hosted by theplatform. Vongo supports PCs and media players that are Microsoft PMCs -- the key thing though is that Vongo requires Windows Media for Portable Media Centers Version 2 but all the PMCs I have access to (four of them) all have Version 1. I went to the websites of all iRiver, Samsung and Creative and there is no new firmware for these devices. Bottom line - couldn't use Vongo. You may want to consider selling your V1 PMCs on eBay.
Zvue.com -- the zvue.com site is still in beta and just uses the default templates given by theplatform.com...so the UI sucks...The selection also sucks. Zvue.com allows you to download two separate files of the same movie you purchase: one is 320 X 240 and the other is 160 X 120. The 320 X 240 files wouldn't transfer to the PMC. Windows Media Player gave a message saying it couldn't reformat the size and bitrate of protected files to make them appropriate for the PMC...which was odd because it didn't have a problem with the CinemaNow file (below) which was also 320 X 240 and had a HIGHER bit rate. The Zvue guys were OK about filling out metadata. Three of the four titles I bought from them had Title and Genre. However, the actor entry listed the studio they licensed the content from instead of listing the lead actor.
CinemaNow - CinemaNow offers videos to buy and rent for PC, Portable Media devices and, more recently, smart phones. They fully support MS DRM. There are 821 videos available for Portable Media centers. Granted -- I am a total high-brow culture snob when it comes to movies (buñuel, antonioni, kurosawa, stuff like that) but finding something worth purchasing (even if for my kids) was a major struggle. I bought Rossellini's Open City but I couldn't bring myself to buy the two other movies I could actually recognize -- Victor Victoria and Short Circuit. I thought of buying some of the music offerings but these were second rate shows from bands that I was into at some point but no longer am -- MC5, The John Entwhistle Group (?), Half Japanese and others of that ilk. One has to select the appropriate file -- for PC or portable media player. The purchase and download were straightforward.Things became complex once the file was on the HDD. I loaded in to Windows Media Player and double-clicked. WMP told me it was acquiring a license and then went into an endless loop trying to acquire the license. The file then wouldn't transfer to the portable media player. I had to contact support, get a voucher to > re-download the file. The trick is that you can't double-click the file in WMP because that tries to play the file ON THE PC -- and I had bought the version for PMC. You have to go straight to Sync and transfer to the PMC WITHOUT trying to play in the PC or else the DRM gets all scoobied. There was no metadata in the CinemaNow title -- even the Title was empty but Windows Media Player defaults to displaying the file name if no Title entry is found
After all that, Open City at 320 X 240 and some two crappy postage stamp-sized kid videos are loaded on my PMC. It is too bad there isn't a leading in-file metadata standard like ID3 tags for video or EXIF for photo. There seem to be a zillion external metadata standards for video metadata -- pmeta, TVAnytime, OpenEPG, OCAP, ASF, MPEG7 but I am not sure if they have a metadata structure that can be freely licensed and put IN the file.
Bottom line -- video on "plays for sure" portable devices still sucks. Back in 1989, Intel acquired the David Sarnoff Research Center from RCA for its Digital Video Interactive (DVI) technology. I became the field technical engineer for that product helping the sales people. I then went on to be marketing manager of Intel's video compression algorithms (Indeo Video) and then become a VP at a video-sharing and infrastructure site. To date, I have been working with digital video for about 17 years and consider myself a bit of an expert. Getting video from online services for my portable players is still hard for me....gotta feel for the wal-mart dude.
Posted by raza at March 15, 2006 7:59 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.jadugar.com/blog/mt-tb.cgi/5
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)