Blogged with Flock

UPDATE: Crashpod reader Ron asked us if we knew the answer to why KCRW podcasts cause some iPods to reset. Well Ron, unfortunately we don’t have the technical answer for that. A coworker of mine was experiencing the problem and was also unable to find any information. His final solution was to delete all KCRW-branded podcasts off of his 5G iPod. It now works just fine. Thanks for reading and be sure to check back often!

I decided to try downloading a film from the new iTunes store this morning. After a quick browse through the store I came upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a favorite book of mine and a great example of an adaptation done right. Hitchhiker came out last holiday season so it was available for the “old releases” price of $9.99. Perfect. I plunked down the money and the download started straight away.

The download was quick, about 45 minutes over my 6Mbps connection, but perhaps not as fast as originally advertised by Apple. That said, I was impressed by how easy and painless it was to watch the film as it was downloading. About 15 minutes into the download I started it up and it played in full resolution with no stuttering. As for the quality, “near-DVD” is a good description. It plays in widescreen (thankfully) and some compression is noticeable but it’s certainly not distracting. From what I’ve watched thus far, it looked great even in fullscreen mode on my 20.1″ Dell widescreen monitor. I imagine it would look just fine on a standard definition television as 640 x 480 is roughly the resolution of SDTV.

Films remember your playback position (just like a DVD player does) and even feature a chapter selection built right into the controls. The chapter names are displayed along with a screen capture of each chapter. This is quite handy for calling up certain scenes or specific moments in a film. The standard track skip will take you to the next chapter in a linear fasion.

I’ve got to say, thus far I’m very impressed with the service. The download was fast, inexpensive and of high quality. My 1.33Ghz Powerbook G4 seems to be handling playback just fine even while using Photoshop CS and writing this blog post. I could have spent $13.99 plus additional shipping charges and waited a week for this film by purchasing it through Amazon, but that seems so 90’s at this point. iTunes will allow you to play back the film on 5 computers and unlimited iPods, and come this Spring beam it wirelessly to your main television using Apple’s iTV. I’m starting to feel like physical media such as DVDs and CDs are more of a bother than they are worth. As hard disk and flash drive storage prices continue to plummet, and connectivity between consumer devices improves, why even bother having all those silver discs lying around? I would much rather call up the media I’m looking for over an advanced home network.

The future is coming, resistance is useless.

UPDATE: I’ve just realized that when you sync your iPod with your computer it will make note of how far along in the movie you are and start playing at that point if you access it on your ‘pod. Nice touch!

This site gives you an animated representation of how and why bittorrent works. Use keystrokes to add seeders and leechers and watch a swarm being created right in front of your eyes. Whether you are new to the technology or a seasoned pro, this is a useful tool for getting your head ’round the concept of bittorrent. Or for hypnotizing yourself on a lazy afternoon…

Blogged with Flock

Apple hit the tech world with a raft of announcements at their “Showtime” event on Tuesday. Now that Ryan and I have had a chance to talk about some of the new products and services, here is our take on Tuesday’s announcements.

The much ballyhooed “widescreen video iPod” was not to be at this event. Instead we got refreshed full-size iPods (now widely being referred to as 5.5G) with:

• 60% brighter screens
• Larger hard drives (30GB and 80GB)
• Longer battery life (3.5 hours and 6.5 hours of video playback respectively)
• Lower prices ($249 and $349)
• New headphones
• Gapless Playback
• Instant Searching
• Letter overlay when scrolling
• New Games

At first glance, these updates are a bit underwhelming, but taken all together they make for some pretty nice enhancements, especially given the $50 price reduction. The pieces of this puzzle that I am most excited about are the gapless playback and searching improvements. Ever since making the transition to digital music I’ve been really bummed out about the small gaps between songs that originally flowed into each other. If you have an album on CD where say, track 3 and 4 blend right into one another, the new iPods will play these songs without a gap between them as originally intended by the artist. Nice!

The ability to search for songs on the iPod using text and the letter overlay while scrolling are also welcome additions. Using the touch wheel to zip around 30-80GB of songs was getting a bit tiresome. These new features allow you to search for songs or albums by using the wheel to select letters instead of just scrubbing back and forth through the entire list until you find the track you are looking for.

Way, way more thoughts after the jump!

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