Ready....Set....Squint!

In addition to the two-day Digital Cinema Summit at last month's NAB conference, I also attended an excellent half-day tutorial sponsored by the IEEE, entitled 'Delivering Television to Handheld Devices: A Technology Tutorial'. I was particularly educated and entertained by the presentations delivered by Texas Instruments (the developer of the Hollywood TV-on-cellphone chip), Modeo (a DVB-H implementer, employing Windows Media audio and video codecs) and Qualcomm (the developer of MediaFLO, a competitive technology approach to DVB-H, which will be implemented by Verizon).

I've previously expressed skepticism about the mobile video concept, but I always try to remain open-minded to new information, and the NAB discussion whetted my appetite. So for the past few weeks, my wife and I have been playing around with a 30 GByte 'video' iPod; not the true live TV experience, mind you, but a reasonable approximation. Lil's downloaded a few back episodes of Alias that our overstuffed ReplayTV didn't have enough room to record. She's watched them on our Mac mini attached to a 1280×768 pixel 17" widescreen LCD, which makes me cringe. They are only 320×240 pixel source files, after all, and no amount of clever post-processing can completely overcome the full-screen fuzziness and blocky MPEG-4 artifacts (at least to my sensitive eyeballs). She's also watched them on the iPod; small, crisp screen = much better result.

I've ripped a few DVDs to the iPod's H.264 (aka MPEG-4 Part 10, aka MPEG-4 AVC) video codec option (the iPod also supports prior-generation MPEG-4 Simple Profile). Previously, this was a tedious multi-step process that also temporarily gobbled up a lot of disc drive space. On the Mac, you'd use a program such as MacTheRipper to decrypt the CSS copy protection and dump a DRM-free version of the DVD image on the HDD, then encode it using a program such as iSquint. The Windows analogy to MacTheRipper is a program such as DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink, and Videora iPod Converter will encode the resultant CSS-less MPEG-2 video to an iPod-friendly format. I've listed common freeware programs; numerous shareware and retail software packages also exist.

Now, however, a program called Handbrake has emerged to dispense with the multi-step complexity. It's released for OS X; even simpler Handbrake Lite (created by the developer of iSquint) and Instant Handbrake options are also available, as is an experimental Windows version of Handbrake. Instant Handbrake, I was happy to find out earlier today, is (unlike EasyWMA) multi-threaded; it'll harness both of my G5 Power Mac's CPUs. And it encodes at near-realtime rates; speeds ranged from 19 to 23 fps in the time that I was observing its operation.

Continued with 'Legal Perplexity'….