The advantages:

• some applications for iPhone/iPod just have no worthy counterpart in the ‘normal’ world.
• an application would run immediately on Apple MacOSX as well as Windows XP/Vista/7
• the iPhone developers wouldn’t be looking anymore at a potential audience of some X million iPhone owners, but at all iTunes owners.

Research analyst Sam Bhavnani, of the market research firm Current Analysis, says that iTunes has 200 million users. Research analyst Shaw Wu, of the market research firm American Technology Research, gives a figure of 100 million. Oddly, Apple itself gives a much lower number: 10 million.
Google Answers

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Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber.

I saw Let’s Get Lost in Leuven, I guess around 1990. Chet Baker has been a weak spot for me ever since, because I now knew how much suffering was hiding behind that vulnerable voice. I tried to find a DVD of it but apart from a VHS tape (I don’t have a player) I couldn’t find anything. Then the other day I found the whole movie, split in 13 parts, on Youtube:

Now I could watch them on my PC one after the other, but I wondered if I couldn’t join them and watch them as 1 single movie on my Apple TV. And I managed. Of course, the quality is not comparable to DVD, but it’s something. Here’s the procedure:

• I installed Easy Youtube Video Downloader for Firefox.
• I downloaded the 13 parts one by one. Each file was a 40MB MPEG4 video. The format:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Chet Baker Lets Get Lost 1988 0113.mp4‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 628 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 44100 Hz, stereo
  Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 480×360, 30.00 tb(r)
• I transcoded each file to a .VOB (MPEG2, DVD format). Each VOB file is about 180MB. For the transcoding I used ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i [INPUT.MP4] -target pal-dvd -y [OUTPUT.VOB]
  The result:
  Input #0, mpeg, from ‘Letsgetlost01.vob‘:
  Duration: 00:08:21.2, start: 0.500000, bitrate: 2734 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 1:1 DAR 5:4], 9000 kb/s, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: liba52, 48000 Hz, stereo, 448 kb/s
• The handy thing with .VOB files is that you can append them into 1 file and they just play in sequence. So I just did copy *.VOB ONEBIGFILE.VOB and this gave me a 2,2GB video file in DVD format.
• I now needed to transcode it again to a format that plays on my AppleTV, so I used Mediacoder to do that.
  The final result: a 525 MB video file, ready for my bedroom TV:
  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘Letsgetlost.mp4‘:
  Duration: 01:54:55.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 624 kb/s
  Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 640×480, 25.00 tb(r)
  Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 48000 Hz, stereo

Now just imagine I could do the following: search for the movie in iTunes, pay for it, let it download and it’s there, 15 min later, on my Apple TV. If it were possible, would I do that? Yes. But the movie industry does not have a solution for the long tail of video, does not want to set up a convenient distribution model for video, certainly not for that funny region called ‘Europe’ and so we need to resort to elaborate and cumbersome methods that, unfortunately, do not make them any money.

The world around the movie companies has changed, the customers have changed, the technology has changed, and if they keep on refusing to adapt, they’ll be like a buggy whip company.

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company?

Larry the Liquidator – Other People’s Money

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1. Find a source file

• I typically start from an existing MP3 file. It might be a CD I have ripped to MP3, or a soundtrack from DVDs or other sound bites. I also have a collection of accapella samples that are a nice source.

2. Create the 15 – 30 sec tone in MP3 format

• You don’t need a 5 min ringtone, just 15 to 30 seconds will be enough
• I use Audacity (with the LAME MP3 encoder add-on) to load the full source MP3 file, trim out the piece I want and then add a fade-in and fade-out.

3. Export to MP3

• I then export the file to an MP3 file of 128kbps. You don’t need better quality than that anyway. If you want, you can convert the file to mono here, or it can happen in the next step
• Result: ringtone.mp3

4. Convert with ffmpeg to MPEG4 ringtone

• I prefer using the command-line ffmpeg for transcoding of audio and video.
• The simple way of doing it: ffmpeg -i ringtone.mp3 -y ringtone.m4a (.m4a stands for MPEG4 audio, ffmpeg will see this extension and use default settings for the conversion.) Afterwards you then have to change the extension to .m4r (MPEG4 ringtone).
• The detailed one-step-only way to do this: ffmpeg.exe -i ringtone.mp3 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -y ringtone.m4r

5. Open file with iTunes

• Just double-click the file, that should do it.

The lazy way:

let’s make a batch file that will automatically convert the first 30 seconds of any MP3 file into an iPhone ringtone:
SET INPUT=%1
SET NAME=%INPUT:.mp3=%
SET OUTPUT=%NAME%.m4r
echo CONVERT %INPUT% to %OUTPUT% ...
ffmpeg.exe -i %INPUT% -t 30 -ac 1 -ab 128000 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -genre Ringtone -y %OUTPUT%

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No iPhone, thanks

This is not my first iPod, I think I’m at n° 5. And before you start telling me “the iPod Touch is an iPhone, that can’t be used for calling. Why not buy an iPhone?”. Well, I don’t need a new phone yet, I’m probably gonna buy an iPhone in a year or so, when the GSM providers have reasonable data transfer prices, and there’s the price too: the 8GB iPod is slightly over 200 euro. The iPhone is 525 euro.

Applications

But this baby is really neat. It does music, sure, and video, like the previous one. But it’s got Wifi, a big, smart touch-screen, games, applications, and … From day one I’m using Google Mail (via IMAP), the Weather application, Google Maps. Then I started looking through the free applications on the App Store. So what am I using now:

• Games: Dactyl, Cube Runner, BlueSkiesLite, Sudoku, TapTap
• Stuff: iDoodle2Lite, WhiteNoise, Remote
• Network: AirSharing, Speedtest, IM+, Palringo
• Social networking: Facebook, AroundShare, GooSync, ShoZu, reQall
• Info: BuienRadar

I’ve just started using reQall, a kind of task list + shopping list, which allows you to add via the iPod/iPhone, via the web and via a IM (Gtalk) account. This looks promising.

The games are not bad. Dactyl is strangely addictive, the movement sensors work really well with BlueSkiesLite, … I expect to see some killer iPod/iPhone games in the future.

The only thing I miss now is a good sync with my Google Calendar. iTunes can sync my iPod contacts with Google Mail, but not my calendar. GooSync is supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t get it to work. Of course Apple wants me to use (paid) MobileMe, but I want to see if I can find a free way first.

In any case, I discover a new use every day. It’s … exciting, actually.

Wifi

I had Wifi on my Nokia N91, but I haven’t seen it so well integrated as on this iPod. It saves connection credentials and connects to known networks without asking. Well, the fact that I find this remarkable says more about the user-unfriendliness of the (Nokia) Symbian OS than anything else. But the feeling that you have a small Internet-ready device, that allows you to check email and read web pages comfortably everywhere, is awesome.

User Interface

People who know me, know I’m not the biggest fan of Mac OSX. Don’t try to convince me it’s easy and intuitive, because for me it isn’t. But this iPod Touch is another story. This is the best user interface ever.

You switch it on and it’s there immediately (not when it has to boot, of course, but when it’s just inactive) The screen is sharp and large. Text is easy to read. Images look great. You intuitively tap on a web page when it’s too small, and it zooms in until the paragraph is as wide as your screen. And then you turn the device 90°, your application switches from portrait to landscape and browsing becomes even easier.

The multi-touch screen feels totally intuitive. You flip through your photos by sliding them left and right, you scroll down by just dragging, you zoom in and out with two fingers and it feels like it’s the way things should have been all along. I even catch myself trying the two-finger zoom-in on my TomTom GPS, where it -obviously- does NOT work.

I took the iPod, did not read any manual (duh!) and I figured everything out in, what, 30 seconds? It’s better than the TomTom, and that one was already very good.

Hardware top 3

Apple makes great hardware. The MacBook looks slick and classy, the MacPro looks strong and professional, and this iPod Touch is not only beautiful, it acts likes it’s an extension of your brain, through your fingers.

It just entered my personal top 3 of hardware devices that make my life better. It jumped over the TomTom GPS and sits next to my Canon 350D. If some more killer apps come out, it’s totally gonna take #1.

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My iPod Nano has gone into the equivalent of a coma. No matter what you do with the “HOLD” switch, it remains in a locked state. So while you can see when you connect it to a PC that the music is still there and the battery still works, you cannot use it, since the play-button (as well as all the others) does not respond.

Switching frantically between HOLD ON/HOLD OFF does not work, pushing excessively towards “HOLD OFF” (to the left) does not work. Is there a way to disable the HOLD button, or is that a mechanical connection that is not managed by the firmware? Can you open an iPod Nano and ‘clean the contact’?

The only other option I see is to buy a docking-station-with-speakers that includes a remote control. But why spend another 100€ on a 4GB iPod that doesn’t work properly …

Any ideas?

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Apple typically offers its HD trailers in 3 formats: 480p, 720p and 1080p. The “p” stands for “progressive” i.e. not interlaced, every frame is a full picture instead of only the odd or even lines. The 480 in “480p” stands for the number of lines in the image. 480p is roughly equivalent with DVD quality, 720p is “HD Ready” and 1080p is “Full HD”.

But let me give a concrete example of the resolution of 3 trailers:


The standard resolutions are defined for 16:9 aspect ratio. 1080 divided by 9 times 16 is 1920. When a trailer is produced in a different ratio (e.g. ’scope’ or 2.35:1 – the wide cinema standard), then the full width is used: 1920 pixels, but the height is only 1/2.35 of this or 816 pixels, not the full 1080. If the end result must be encoded as 1920×1080, black borders have to be added on the top and bottom, which is called “letterboxing”. Of course, with Quicktime and other video file formats, a film can be encoded as 1920×816 pixels, and the player take care of displaying as wide as he can, and filling the top and bottom with black.

In concrete: 480p defines a canvas of 848×480 (852 pixels would be closer to 16:9, but for some reason Apple uses 848 as width). 720p means 1280×720 (for Witless Protection, Apple uses 1248×702 – God know why), and 1080p translates into 1920×1080.

If the trailer is not in 16:9 or 1.78:1 aspect ratio but wider, then the used width will stay the same, but the number of used lines (what gave the standards their name in the first place) changes. So for ’scope’ trailers, 480p means 352 lines, 720p would actually have 544 lines and 1080p levels out to 816 lines. Hence: 720p isn’t always 720p.

Some proof:

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Let’s see what this would buy you in the (Belgian) Apple store:

Pimped-out MacBook Pro

2,4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
S-ATA disk 250 GB (4200 rpm)
17″ Glossy WUXGA (1920×1200)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, dual-link DVI, 256 MB GDDR3 SDRAM
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
AppleCare Protection plan: 3 years

Which would cost you around 3400 euro (excl taxes/transport).

Let’s now compare that to a fully expanded Dell Precision portable workstation from the Dell store:

Pimped-out Dell Precision M90

Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 (2,33 GHz 4 MB L2-cache 667 MHz FSB)
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Windows® XP Professional, SP2 (NTFS)
3 jaar Business Support
3 jaar CompleteCare Accidental Damage Cover
17″ WUXGA (1920 x 1200) UltraSharp screen
NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 1500M, 256 MB RAM
100 GB harde schijf (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW-station
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini-kaart (54 Mbps) Core2 Duo
Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth

Which will set you back … 3280 euro. Or wait, try this:

Pimped-out Dell Inspiron XPS M1710

Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 Processor (2,33 GHz, 667 MHz, 4 MB L2-cache)
Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Premium XPS-service, 3 y
17″ UltraSharp WUXGA display, 1920 x 1200
4GB 667 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
160 GB S-ATA disk (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW
512 MB DDR3 nVidia® GeForce™ Go 7950 GTX
Dell™ Wireless 355 Bluetooth 2.0
Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI-kaart

At a staggering … 3280 euro, or just the same as the Precision.

I know, to some extent, it’s comparing Apples to oranges, but I’m just saying: for a high-end notebook, a MacBook Pro is not that excessively expensive.

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Ok, it’s a nice phone, but will all those Mac fans please stop panting in my ear? 4GB hard disk, Wifi, video player? I already have those in my phone. The Jonathan Ive touch? Yes, will probably make a difference. We’ll see that when the phone becomes available over here, by the end of 2007. In the mean time, pour some cold water on that boner, will you?

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2009 iPod as personal media storage

That new iPod ‘3D’ might not be much bigger than the current 60GB iPod video, but it has a better 16:9 screen, and way more storage. It ships with a 500GB Flash card that is replaceable. You typically buy more storage cards: 1 for all your music, 1 for essential movies (with that Hitchcock and Tarantino collection), 1 for TV series (one season is around 15GB) and fill them up from your 50TB home media set-up.
The sleek white player has wireless USB and uses wireless battery reload (with magnetic holder) so you don’t need a cable for anything. Your 5.1 headphones: wireless. Copying from that 50TB iTunes/Tivo media station: wireless. Hooking it up to an HD-TV: wireless. Sure, it has Gigabit Wifi too (which is really only around 250Mbps, but we’re used to that from the 802.11 guys), but not everyone uses that yet, certainly not in that Ardennes village where you booked that small hotel for your “24″ marathon (12 seasons, who would have thought? Thank god for the 2x hi-speed viewing mode).
It can obviously play the new “3HD” (3-dimensions) standard, which is really neat if you have one of those new holographic projectors. If you have subscribed to the (rather expensive) iTunes ‘Premium Hollywood’ service, you get all new movies on your iPod at the same moment when they are released in the cinemas. You only get them at consumer-grade HD resolution (2048×1080 – looks OK on that 50″ screen), not at the new DCI 8K standard for movie theatres (8192×4320 with HDR) but who’s complaining.

2009 iPod as personal media receiver

While still not bigger that the current iPod nano, the new iPod ‘nanoo‘ packs 50GB of flash storage. Not that you know about it, because that’s just used as an temporary storage for what’s coming in over the air. As simple as its design might look, the device is packed with antennas: Gigabit Wimax and EDGE (it obviously doubles as a phone and PDA too) next to of course wireless USB and BluetoothXL.
Even when you’re not using it, it is always busy: as a VoIP node, as a BitTorrent node, as a P2P GPS traffic node, as a streaming audio/video node. The bandwidth providers just adore it. If the consumers do not want to be limited to usage in the municipal area, where most people share their 200Mbps DSL broadband connections, and Google provides free access points with 2Gbps (with a secure VPN, of course, because they don’t want other people to be evil), then they need to take a 3G mobile subscription with a 500GB/month data plan that is not really that cheap. Luckily iPods know how to make ad-hoc mesh networks so that they can bundle and share their downloads. It’s remarkable: when 10 people with an iPod download a movie in the same 500m radius area, their download speed is 5x as fast as when they do it alone. Thanks to satellite-to-Wimax routing services, you can get up to TV 5000 channels on any device. Although the concept of ‘channel’ has changed. Some channels are really only good filters/recommendation services that pick out the good bits out of exabytes of TV/movie archives. The concepts of “peer-2-peer” or “video-on-demand” no longer exist. Everything is peer-to-peer, and everything is on demand.

My opinion

I think the storage scenario is more realistic. There are no technical barriers to either scenario, but I think the bandwidth scenario will not be economically viable for a longer time. The mobile operators (Vodaphone, Cingular) are used to charging for every byte of information, they will not allow an environment where everyone can afford to download everything, all-the-time, non-stop. They will keep that expensive.

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25 years ago, the last real proof of innovation coming from the recording industry:

In 1979 Philips and Sony decided to join forces, setting up a joint task force of engineers whose mission was to design the new digital audio disc. Prominent members of the task force were Kees Immink and Toshitada Doi. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the taskforce produced the “Red Book”, the Compact Disc standard. (…)
According to Philips, the Compact Disc was thus “invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team.”
from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

Three years of constructive working and a new technology was developed that was revolutionary superior.

In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. (Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner’s company, had by now become a part of PolyGram). The first CD that was pressed in Hanover was a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauß. In January 1983, 500 working days after the start of production, half a million CDs had been made.
from research.philips.com

The CD was an instant hit and made a lot of companies a lot of money:

2002

What major enhancements did the recording industry add to this?

In 1991 Philips tried the CD-i (interactive CD) which failed. In 1993 Sony released the SA-CD, introducing an imperceptible sound quality improvement in the hope of being able to charge even more than $20 for 1 hour of music. It’s not doing much either (only 3000 SA-CDs available).
In the mean time, the computer industry embraced the CD-ROM and CD-R, moved on to the DVD and will now jump on the HD-DVD/BluRay wagon. The music industry, on the other hand, only saw DVD as a delivery medium that’s slightly harder to copy, and allows adding some video and larger booklets in order to charge more.
The Fraunhofer Institute released the first MPEG1 Layer 3 encoder in 1994, within 5 years MP3 became the most disruptive technology to music distribution. The recording industry did basically nothing until 2000, when they sued Napster.
Bottom line: they sat on their *ss and just counted the money coming in.

Gracenote

One of the big advantages of MP3? It is a format that contains its own metadata: you can store Title, Artist, Genre, … in the ID3 tags. Where does that data come from? In most cases from online databases like Gracenote (formerly CDDB), MusicBrainz and FreeDB. External databases, because that info is not on the CD.
Now, isn’t is silly that in 20 years of CD product development no one has come up with a way to specify the album title and songs on the CD itself? This has me baffled. There’s plenty of empty space on an average music CD and the extra data is rarely bigger than 1KB. All you would need is a small TXT file that contains the titles, but is ignored by players that cannot interpret it. This is not only good for ripping music (something the music industry doesn’t like too much) but for any CD playing device. It’s silly that CDs give you impeccable digital sound but you still have to look up the titles of the album and songs in the CD notes.

Actually, I’m quite sure that the idea for adding song metadata to a CD has been suggested before within the recording companies. And their logic will have been: “we prefer that the customer needs the actual CD sleeve and booklet to enjoy the music fully. We think the extra work of needing to xerox the booklet is a good prevention of piracy. It might be more convenient for the customer, yes, since when is that an argument?”

iTunes

Nothing remarkable was done with commercial digital music distribution until 2003, when Apple started its iTunes Music Store. If anything, it showed that the consumer was ready to pay for digital music if the right (portable) carrier was there and if he could pick and choose at a transparent, predictable and reasonable price. Reaction of the majors on this first really successful initiative (that they didn’t sue – yet): we need variable (higher) pricing , less iPod and more DRM.

In 20 years, textbooks of (product) management and marketing will be filled with examples from the RIAA and IFPI: “how not to do it – why pissing off your customers is not a good strategy”.

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The baseline

First off, the original Mac Mini
sleek, square, white, with just a minimal CD slot and no buttons or logo on the frontpanel.
If evolution would build a PC, this is what it would look like. Now let’s take a look at what ‘intelligent design’ has to offer:

‘Barebone’ PCs

This was my first option. A barebones is a (small) PC case with the motherboard already inside, to which you just have to add CPU, memory, hard disk and CD-drive.

	First try: the Shuttle XPC G5 8300 Not much on the front panel, granted, but evenso it’s industrial design with the stress on ‘industrial’. Too many lines, and a prominent unsexy logo.
	Second: the iWill XP4-D I don’t like the blue that much, but the frontpanel is quite sober, which is good. Now if they could replace that slide-out CD drive with an even nicer slide-in version (like the Mac Mini)…
	Third: the AOpen EZ-65 Pretty close! I also chose AOpen when I bought my first barebones PC a year ago because I liked the design. But I have bad experiences with the CD-drive cover (it blocks most of the times when I eject the drive, so I have to pull it open manually), so I would prefer a vendor that makes a model with the CD drive built in and, for esthetical reasons, puts the USB/Firewire/audio connectors on the back.

VCR form factor or Multimedia PCs

A PC in a box the size of a VCR/DVD player. In most cases either too ugly or too expensive.

the Shuttle M1000

the Hush Mini ITX

the ASUS Digimatrix

Tiny tower

Rectangular box that stands up, and small enough to be put next to the screen. Small but not beautiful.

the IWill ZPC-sp	the Asus Pundit	the Antec Minuet II

Original designs

At least they try …

the AOpen MZ 855	the Asus S-Presso	the IWill ZMAX D2

Conclusion

So I have seen no PC design close to the geek-sleek of Apple. Is it a lack of balls or of talent? What advise can I give Shuttle, Iwill and the likes?

hire a super-talent designer

someone with no experience in PC design and a fresh mind

Philippe Starck has designed a Microsoft Mouse, I’m not sure that counts as ‘PC design’ but this is the caliber you should be looking at

Maybe someone who has done car design. Pininfarina?

aim a bit higher than a barebone PC

add 512 MB RAM with option to add more (it’s a commodity product, no one cares about the brand)

add the CD-drive (it’s the biggest moving part on a PC, the ‘eject’ should be silent and flawless), offer choice between a DVD-CDR combo or a DVD writer

CPU and disks change too fast, leave those out

set up VAR (Value Added Resellers) network

they should not only sell the product but also assemble it to a fully finished product. Not enough shops allow “Add P4 3GHz, 250GB disk and ship it, already”. I want to see more minisystems shops!

See pictures of these and more designs on http://www.pixagogo.com/2022405128

Technorati: pc – design – sff – barebone – shuttle – aopen – iwill – asus – antec

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Q.E.D.

Technorati: apple – ipod

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