Movies On Your iPod - The Next Digital Rights Battlefield?
Steve Kadinski
Apple's iPod has transformed from a digital music player to a digital media player par excellence. Now in its fifth generation, the iPod brand covers devices that play music, display pictures of album covers, allow touch based interfaces, and even play your favorite movies and television programs, all available through the Apple Music Store. Beyond the commercial options, you can also download copies of your own video programming to your iPod through the iTunes music store.
How do you add a movie to become a part of your iPod movies? The first step is to choose what movie you want to put in your iPod movies. You can opt to download movies straight from the Internet but that might cost a bit more, around $2 USD for a movie. It is highly recommended that users download their iPod movies through the Apple iTunes Music Store.
For one thing, it is not so easy to convert DVD into iPod movies because of the possibility of incompatibility with the software. Secondly, you can be sure of the quality of your iPod movies.
Similar deals exist for VHS tapes and DVDs, but not for broadcasting streaming content on the Internet, and for sale through the iTunes music store and other digital outlets. That residual money is what pays for WGA members health insurance plans, mortgages and the like, and the writers are justifiably concerned about this.
Video, when it's squashed down for digital presentation, uses an encryption/compression algorithm called a codec. There are several kinds of codecs out there, and the iPod will play a fair number of them. The most commonly used codec out there is called MP4 or MPEG4, and this is the native codec (with some tweaks) that the iPod uses. Make sure that whatever video converter you use gives you a preview function, so you can make sure that everything comes out well. Two "known good" converters are PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter, and ImTOO iPod Movie Converter.
Each of these software converts all of the popular video formats to iPod Movies MP4 (iPod video format MPEG-4) and they also convert audio files to iPod supported MP3, AAC, M4A file format. The conversion process happens automatically so all you have to do is set what format you want the movie converted then set the volume and the directory to save it in. Presto! You now have an addition to your iPod movies.
Copying an existing DVD to iPod formats means that you need to "rip" it to an MPEG 4 with (preferably) an AAC sound codec. There are software packages that can do this, and do it seamlessly.
For now, iPod video economics are set by the Hollywood production companies, because the cost to produce and create those programs is very high, while the cost of distribution can be very cheap - and they want to make sure that they make money doing their jobs. This is an area that's going to change rapidly over the next ten years.
Once the digital video stream has been converted, you just drag and drop the file to your iPod and it'll show up on the digital playlist, and you're good to go. Now, be sure that you're only doing this with DVDs you legally own, and be aware that there's a movement afoot to make DVD copying software illegal, or harder to use. People getting paid for their work is a touchy issue - don't be a pirate.
Right now, the dominant force in iPod video distribution is the production studios. This may change and change rapidly in the next few years. The entire business of digital content creation and distribution is going to get very different, and soon.
The licensing agreements made are there to keep everyone afloat - producing television shoes costs nearly two million dollars an episode for a lot of them, for example, so shooting an entire 22 episode season is 44 to 45 million dollars invested, and the investors want to see a return on their money.
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