On October 12, 2005, Apple announced the fifth-generation iPod, a.k.a. video iPod, which featured the ability to play video with resolutions of up to 480 x 480 and 320 x 240 (videos purchased from the iTunes Music Store are limited to 320 x 240.)
Is the video iPod (and handhelds in general) a viable platform for indie producers to distribute shorts and features? As I’ve said in my iPod video review, you won’t be able to play Lawrence of Arabia on your iPod any time soon.
IMAX movies aside, let’s take the U2 iPod video as an example of what you can play on an iPod and make it look great.
Video iPod - Encoding Video
The video iPod plays MPEG-4 and H.264 video - this is all good news as both codecs are very efficient which results in very high-quality video.
When one considers the target resolution, even files encoded at the highest resolution (230,400 pixels) usually end up about 15MB per minute of video.
Most feature-length videos will be between 1GB and 2GB. If you encode them at 320×240, they’ll be in the 500MB range probably. In other words, even the 30G iPod will store 10+ movies.
Video iPod - Screen and Battery
It has a 65,536 color screen with a 320 x 240 (the pixel count is 76,800) QVGA transflective TFT display. The iPod is also able to display video on an external TV via the AV cable accessory (that’s the only reason to encode at the higher resolution).
16-bit color is OK but definitely not great when you need a dynamic range. Most gradient backgrounds will form strips instead of one smooth transition. Reflections or overexposure create similar patterns. As you can see in the screenshots from the U2 iPod video, there are 3 rules:
- Rule #1: Underexposure
- Rule #2: Silhouettes
- Rule #3: Solid Colors
High-contrast could be put on the list but it would be a bit misleading. For example, a film noir is high-contrast but it might have too many grays for the display to handle.
Practive makes perfect. However, before you rush out with your new HD camera, you should download a few torrents for your iPod (already encoded) and see what works and what doesn’t.
I’ll return to the subject tomorrow when I’ll review how to convert videos for iPod.
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