| Saturday, February 4, 2006 |
19:09 - Welcome to 2006, Gorak
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Steve Jobs is fond of using the "clock" metaphor for describing transition periods: "On the clock of Mac OS X transition, we're at 9:00."
Well, I'm going to use a similar metaphor here. I think that with regard to videos and movies, we are today about where we were in 1996 with respect to music.
Remember 1996? MP3s were becoming quite popular, and the reason for it was that you could finally afford big hard drives (a gigabyte or more) that you could use to store significant numbers of them, and the Internet (especially on college campuses with T3 lines and in-room Ethernet jacks) was fast enough that people could transfer 5MB files around without much hesitation.
Sure, the tools for creating new MP3 files were rudimentary and unpolished. I remember the process: I had to use a Power Mac 7100 in the Mac lab to rip my CDs to AIFF files (a process which took about twenty minutes per song and which resulted in 60MB files on disk), because the CD-ROM drivers for the various Wintel PCs around my student house were so flaky that you couldn't rip them without getting those notorious clicks and pops and skips. Only the Mac did a good enough job, but others had different luck. And then I had to FTP the files to the Windows PC on my desk in my room—one at a time, because scratch space for those huge files was at a premium—and then use a DOS utility to encode the AIFF files into MP3s, crunching them down to 1/12 their original size. And then, playing the files was no walk in the park either; we had WinAmp, that great new breakthrough, and MacAmp and Amp for Unix, that let us double-click on a file and have a song start playing, at something pretty close to its original quality. It even had little graphic-equalizer bars and volume sliders. Man, what days those were. We had plenty of time to admire the interface, because we couldn't do anything else with our Pentium-90s while our MP3 files played—it took up all the horsepower our CPUs had to spare.
But it was obvious that what we were looking at was the future in the making. Clearly things would get better. MP3 creation would someday be a lot faster, a lot more reliable, and a lot more direct. We didn't necessarily think that any big-name companies would get into the game—MP3 files were, after all, the antithesis of the kinds of corporate alliances and copyright shell games the media companies liked to play—but we were confident that at the very least, hard drives would get bigger, processors would get faster, and one day we'd be able to amass vast folder hierarchies full of MP3 files that represented our entire music collections... and other people's too, because file sharing was becoming so prevalent that not having a copy of a particular song in the morning was no excuse for not having a copy of that song in the afternoon.
iTunes came as a bit of a shock to me, as it did to a lot of people. Of course, once I saw it, what it represented was as clear as any such lightning-bolt idea; it signalled the death of the old conception of digital music, of piecemeal utilities and of rudimentary front-end player programs, of clicks and pops and skips, of infinitely customizable "skins", of anarchy, of unreliability. Now the new paradigm, and one we could all get on board with, was: Get your music from your own CDs. Convert them to MP3s and store them all on your computer, and organize them with a few gestures like the Sorceror's Apprentice. In other words, no more ad-hoc organizational schemes with folders inside other folders and long cumbersome filenames on files of unknown provenance. No longer was it easier to get a song of acceptable quality off of Napster than to rip it from your own CDs; suddenly, because importing your CD music was so straightforward and foolproof and even fun, buying music on CD—even if just to rip it and throw away the disc—became a viable option again, even for cynical information-wrangling college kids.
That was 2000, and the era of 1996 was over. It was only a matter of time (though it, too, seemed far-fetched before it happened) that Apple would pull the necessary strings to get the iTunes Music Store open and move us all onto the AAC platform, weaning us into the world of piecemeal 99-cent song downloads (on the newly available broadband networks, though it wasn't out of the question even on modems), and putting the final nail in the coffin of the P2P solution for anyone who's remotely law-abiding as their primary or preferred way of getting music. When we had a guarantee of audio quality in the song we were getting, a buck seemed like a miniscule price to pay in exchange for not finding out that all those 274 copies of what you thought was the latest Madonna song was actually a virally-spread monologue of Madonna haranguing audio pirates (or simply an encoding of the song with annoying audio flaws).
Most importantly, by that stage (in 2003), hard drives had grown to the point where you could safely store all the music you were ever likely to buy in your lifetime, and have room to back it up. Processors were fast enough that the CPU energy required for MP3/AAC playback was down in the noise, and we could stick iTunes in the background and have it serenade us while we played the latest CPU-sucking video games, or just watched the built-in visualizer shimmer along at 70 fps. Digital music had become infrastructural.
And that brings us to 2006.
I have on my desk an iPod video, which I bought for the new book. I've bought several music videos from the iTMS, for the purpose of testing and enjoying alike. I've also bought a number of TV shows to see how they work. On top of that, I've used iTunes' built-in convert-to-iPod function (and iSquint for movie formats it doesn't like) to see how well that works with my existing movie files I've accumulated over the years.
How does it stack up? Pretty well, I'd say. About as well as digital music worked in 1996.
I've been a skeptic of the whole let's-add-video-to-iTunes thing since almost the day we first heard of it. People started talking about how it was the obvious next step now that the color-screen iPod handled photos; even before that, the first-generation iPod had a video-playing Archos Jukebox device to compete against. Why did I feel it wasn't critical to the iPod's success to add video capabilities? Well, leaving aside that it apparently wasn't... I thought that it diluted the iPod's purpose, and it would make the process of feeding it unnecessarily complicated.
Digital music is a pretty straightforward proposition. Or at least it seems so today. Pop in a CD, click a button, and a few minutes later you've magically got digital versions of your songs that you can broadcast all over the house. Plug in your iPod, sync them up, and head off on your bike; no loading up of CDs necessary, no worrying about skipping, no agonizing over playlist contents. There's no fuss, no muss; you hardly even have to think of words like "files" or "formats" anymore, which is how it should be; that's the whole point of iTunes.
But where does video stand with all this? It's hardly as streamlined. Sure, if you buy videos off the iTMS, they're pretty good quality—the frame rate and the visual fidelity and the audio are all top-notch—but the resolution is still only 320x240, which is not archival quality. You're still not able to dispense with your DVDs if you want to collect your favorite TV shows; TiVO still has a market. And why is this? Well, it's because hard drives are still too small to support videos on the same scale as they can with music. We have to pick and choose what we download and import.
It's even worse when it comes to full-length movies. A 22-minute TV show bought for $1.99 from iTunes can run about 100MB; that's hardly unreasonable compared to the quality/size ratio you find in DiVX AVI files on the P2P networks, but it means if you buy a full season of South Park, you've just eaten up nearly two gigabytes of your hard drive, or about 1% of a typical drive on a computer that's not necessarily brand-new. On a disk that's already half-full of music files and digital photos, that's not small potatoes. And it's not even DVD quality. For that, we'd need about four times the disk space as we're currently using for our 320x240 videos; full-resolution feature movies will eat hard drives like popcorn.
It gets worse. Your computer's hard disk might be 250GB, or twice that nowadays; but what about your iPod? Even a 60-gigger won't be enough to hold all of a person's hoarded video collection converted to computer-based digital goodness; you'll have to whittle down your collection into playlists of episodes you want to have on your person. You have to sit and think about what to jettison.
And jettisoning files isn't a trivial matter. In the case of iTMS-bought videos, the file is the only thing you've got; say you've spent $22 on a complete season of Drawn Together, but now you've watched it and you decide it's just taking up space on your disk. What do you do? Do you delete it? If so, you'll have to buy it all over again if you decide you want it back, because currently the iTMS doesn't support on-demand re-downloads of previously purchased files (a feature that it seems they ought to be able to provide, if they have your purchase history and all). Their official recommendation is that you'd better back up all your purchases. And so you do... but then you realize that the disk space investment in supporting your video collection isn't just the size necessary to store the files—but the size necessary to back them up as well. So now you're plugging in external 500GB backup drives and burning through stacks of DVD-Rs just trying to stay ahead of your video-watching needs.
And then what about movies? A typical DiVX AVI rip of a full-length movie routinely runs to 300-400MB, and it's not at what one would usually call DVD quality (artifacts are usually visible). If they start selling feature films through the iTMS, they aren't going to be any smaller than that... and they'll suck up your disk space even faster. And they still won't be of a sufficient quality to replace your DVDs—nor will they look particularly good on your iPod screen. There's a reason why there aren't any movies yet in the iTMS, and I think this is it. Steve knows the infrastructure just isn't there yet.
Besides, even with broadband speeds it still takes a while to download a TV show episode, and a movie would be even worse. Broadband is becoming pretty ubiquitous, but it's not that ubiquitous. Many modem-bound people are unable to take part in this leap into the future. Meanwhile, video playback isn't any picnic on the CPU either, especially at high bitrates and today's extreme compression/decompression algorithms. It's not quite as bad as MP3 playback was in 1996, but it's not quite not either. It still takes up a lot of your computer's attention (to say nothing of your attention—video isn't something you can be as passive about in its consumption as you can with audio).
And to top it all off, there is as yet no standardized method for ripping a movie from DVD the way iTunes codified for CDs. It's a much more complex process, because CDs adhere to a specific and very simple standard (it doesn't even have any digital data such as a unique ID string or a table of track names); DVDs have all kinds of video tracks, overlays, menus, submenus, alternate audio tracks, previews, special features, and what-have-you. Tools such as HandBrake do a pretty good job, but they're hardly in the ballpark of iTunes. Even iTunes itself can't coherently handle the myriad of video formats that can ostensibly be converted for its own use; iTunes can play anything QuickTime can play, but the iPod requires MPEG-4 or AVC/H.264—and you'd better be prepared to do some fiddling and guessing and converting before everything works to your satisfaction.
I understand Clinton was just reelected. Independence Day was a fun movie. Have you seen that "Spirit of Christmas" video yet?
In other words, I'm still a bit reserved on the idea of fitting digital video into the same box of vocabulary as we currently use for digital music. It doesn't quite work the same. The organizational metaphors aren't as apt. The processes for acquiring new content aren't very elegant, and the infrastructure for storing it isn't quite adequate. Our collections of the stuff are still very ad-hoc, and we're waiting for a better format to come along (or at least more disk space) which will finally allow us to hoard our video collections at full DVD resolution, where we can access them through our computers and not feel like we're giving up some quality for the privilege.
The day will come when all those problems are ironed out. Right now, though, we're still making only tentative progress; and while collecting and enjoying digital music has become a part of all of our daily lives, thriving even on modest hardware, video is still the province of the adventurous and the lucky owners of cutting-edge eqipment. And until we've all got multi- terabyte drives, 3GHz dual-core CPUs, 7Mbps broadband, 200GB iPods, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray for backups, and an iTunes that can rip a DVD as effortlessly as it rips a CD, things aren't going to change much.
We've had ten years to practice the digital-music discipline. Video's only just now getting started.
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Brian Tiemann
