| Tuesday, January 31, 2006 |
22:17 - We Have the Way Out
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For several years now, the default format for viral videos out on the Net has been the ubiquitous DiVX-wrapped-in-AVI. Files in the Real format are hard to come by, and QuickTime .MOV files, while holding on to a firm corner of the market, and after a few game attempts to try to get back in the running with MPEG-4, are still eclipsed in general popularity by the goofy-footed WMV format. I found during an experimental file-sharing search that of 245 matching results for a given query, 1 was a WMV; the other 244 were all DiVX AVIs.
Well, now might finally be the time when things are about to change. And the catalyst—naturally—is the iPod.
I'm finding that there are all kinds of any-movie-file-to-iPod-format utilities out there, both for Mac and for Windows; they'll all take pretty much any movie file, even your doughty DiVX AVIs, and convert them to the H.264/AVC MPEG-4 files that iTunes and the iPod use.
And because the iPod's screen is rapidly becoming a de facto standard, as ubiquitous and mainstream as NTSC, all these utilities have the very real advantage of being able to present you with a single big red candy-like button that says "iPod"; no fiddling with quality settings, waiting fifteen minutes, checking the quality and file size, fiddling with the quality settings, and trying again. Now it's just a single, known, widely accepted quality-for-size balance. It's not archival quality—320x240 is not full TV resolution, for one thing—but it's more than enough for the iPod and passable for magnified viewing, and the frame rate is full TV-quality, with no visible artifacting. For that kind of quality, 100MB for a 22-minute TV episode is pretty dang reasonable, and home movies and music videos will just thrive at such levels.
Of course, if you're on a Mac, the "iPod" export option has suddenly become ubiquitous. Whether you're making home movies in iMovie, converting your existing videos in the paid QuickTime Player, exporting a slideshow from iPhoto, or using a third-party utility that hooks into iTunes/QT's H.264 encoder, you just have to select "Movie to iPod" or something similar, and all the details are taken care of for you.
This might well be the tipping point that breaks the DiVX/AVI stranglehold. MPEG-4 alone didn't do it; WMV didn't do it. But the iPod might be the killer app that can.
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Brian Tiemann
