Update (3/25/09): Nuts to this, it’s too much of a pain to keep updated each time I run. If you’ve come here looking for any updates, sorry to disappoint! I’ve kept the original post below…
Went for my first run using Nike+ yesterday (Thursday). It’s very motivational: I had planned to run only 2.5 or 3 miles at most (when I ran on the treadmill for the first time a few days before, I ran for only 2 miles), but this time I pushed myself and ran for a good 4.01 miles.
I’m posting the songs I listened to up on iTunes as iMixes. Of course, they exclude the few songs that aren’t available in iTunes, but check them out, give a listen and see what I had pumping me up for my run that day:
One of the big announcements at Tuesday’s Macworld Expo keynote was that people could now rent movies through iTunes, and if you have an Apple TV you could rent movies directly through there as well. $2.99 for older movies, $3.99 for new releases, and $1.00 more for each if you want it in high definition. Pretty neat, right? Some folks don’t think so, with gripes about the viewing period (you have 30 days to start watching, but once you start the movie you’ve got only 24 hours to finish it) and the format choices (a vocal minority wishes that Apple had chosen a more detailed hi-def format, like 1080p or even 1080i instead of 720p). Neither of those would really prevent me from using it, but I was interested in how renting high-definition content would pan out.
John at daringfireball.net went through a few of the differences between the old iTunes terms of service and the new ones. Most of the changes are just slight language differences to accommodate being able to rent movies short-term instead of purchasing outright. But there’s some language in there to say that if you want to download HD-quality movies, you can only download those movies directly to an Apple TV, and you can only watch them on the Apple TV: you can’t download them to your computer, and if you download them to your Apple TV you still can’t transfer them over your network to your computer. He and his readers speculate that it’s because of piracy concerns from the movie studios:
A few smart DF readers have emailed to suggest it’s about piracy concerns — the studios may want to limit the high-def movies to the Apple TV because it has the HDCP DRM-enabled output.
While that may be a possibility, I’ve got another theory — by saying you can only rent HD movies with an Apple TV, the company is ensuring that the equipment will be able to handle the processing power needed to play back high-definition content. Take this real-life example:
I’ve got a PowerBook G4, 1.25 GHz. It’s about 4 years old now. When I try to play HD movie trailers, my computer doesn’t play them very well, if at all. I wanted to try to rent a HD movie just to see how well my computer would be able to handle it, but I couldn’t find any HD movies in the iTunes store and couldn’t figure out why. Once I read that excerpt from the iTunes terms of service it all became clear to me — it’s to prevent people from using computers that may not be able to play back HD content. Just imagine how people would react to that if they were able to download and couldn’t play back:
I was watching a movie, on my PC… and suddenly it went “bleepbleepbleepbleep”. It’s kind of… a bummer.
See, let’s say that I was able to download a HD-quality movie to my laptop — how would Apple know that my computer didn’t have enough processing power to play the file properly? And even if my computer could, then how would my iPod (with even more limited ability) be able to handle the playback requirements? If you were able to download a high-definition movie on your computer then you’d certainly expect that your equipment would be able to handle the load, but Apple has no idea what kind of equipment you have. The only way they can ensure that you’d be able to play the movie and have it Just Work is by limiting the HD-quality video to the Apple TV. Non-HD video can be played by pretty much any computer, the iPod and the Apple TV as well, so it makes sense that this format isn’t limited to only one type of device.
It’s a shame, really, since it’d be pretty neat to watch a high-def movie with one of those Cinema Displays, but I guess a line had to be drawn somewhere.
February 6, 2009 · No Comments