There’s been a lot of news lately on two fronts: portable video – in the form of the Gen5 iPod and PSP – and the Xbox 360.

This has caused a lot of whining inside my head…

Video encoding sucks. It just simply sucks. Rip a CD and screw it up? No biggie: first off it’s hard to screw it up but even if you do, it’s a 5-10 minute rip cycle. Video takes over an hour for a two hour movie. Ugh. Not only that, but there’s like a billion formats out there… I’ve taken video off my MiniDV tapes: I usually have to encode it three times, because I always get it wrong the first two… NTSC is a given, but what resolution? What fps? What about 16:9 versus 4:3? Which DVD type? Bah. And what’s worse is that it’s followed me to my two portable devices.

At first, I was glad to hear that the iPod and the PSP both supported MP4 video. I figured “neat! I can encode a video once and send it to either device!” What a fuckin’ pipe dream that was. Or has been so far.

The latest iPods have two specific sizes of video that it can support… I hear the PSP has a similar restriction but I haven’t found out what it is yet. I sent an encoded movie over to the iPod: iTunes yelled at me. “We can’t send this to the iPod b/c of the size – see this URL for more information.” Three clicks away I found the footnote that gave me the specific screen size: 320 x 240 in this instance. OK, fine. I sent a letterbox edition of a movie that was encoded for 320 x 240… over 50% of the screen was used by the black bars and I had to use headphones, which irked me for some reason. Lame!

Over on the PSP, things are almost as interesting… they have a specific file name structure that has to be followed – this is how they can get away with no OS on the device – and that may or may not be right for me: I’ve yet to successfully play a movie there.

The biggest saving grace for the PSP is UMD. If can get a movie on UMD and drop it into a PSP, it’s a piece of cake. The problems with UMD are that I can’t burn my own and commercially they are the same price as regular DVD discs… so I have to spend twice as much money for any given movie…? Unacceptable. I refuse to rebuy any of the movies I already own! If UMD discs were included when I bought a DVD title, that’d be good. Or if I could play UMD discs on a regular TV – either via PSP or via UMD players – that would be good, too – I’d start buying UMD discs for my home viewing. But I can’t do either of those!

So, basically, video sucks.

Dovetailing, this leads into the thought of “what if I could connect my PSP to my iPod?”. After all, they’re both USB devices… I know the iPod has a connector that allows it to act as a storage device for cameras – why couldn’t it act like a storage device for my PSP? Granted, I know that the PSP goes into a “don’t fuckin’ touch me!” mode when a USB connection is active, but wouldn’t it be nice? You carry an iPod for music – that usually goes everywhere. After all, you can listen to music and still do stuff: work, read the paper, walk down the street, etc., so it has more “daily” potential. Then you opt to travel, which is a longer less interactive stretch of time, so you take both your PSP and iPod. Since the iPod has 30x the storage of a Duo stick, you store some videos on the iPod… Plug in a cable between the iPod and PSP, and zoop: play video that’s stored on the iPod on the bigger screen and with external sound. And now with two batteries working for you, instead of one.

Won’t ever happen though. Sony would only do that if they sold their own hard drive to enable it: they are firm believers in devices interopting but only if they’re all Sony devices. If it’s not Sony it either doesn’t exist or it isn’t support (and in some cases, both!).

Not that Apple is any better. I’ve been reading reports on Apple-fan sites that “iTunes bought music won’t play on the 360!” Well no shit. Microsoft has mentioned a few times that if you plug an iPod into a 360, that the 360 would be able to play the music it found. It’s done similar things with other players (and computers) – it’s simply nifty like that. The Apple-fans snorted at this intrusion of their world and responded with “it won’t play bought music – ha ha!”. Of course it won’t, ya dumbasses. Apple refuses to allow anyone to have access to their DRM technology. Anyone. It’s locked down – no one can license it. So how could any expect the 360 to open files that are weighed down by their DRM?

Duh.

Der! Der! Der! *sigh*

And the fact that it’s Apple that is refusing to play with others is comical, yet not surprising. Of course, you can’t call that a monopoly. Heavens no! Since it’s Apple, you have to call it “smart” or “innovative” or some shizzle.

Someone smarter than me should get all of these things to play together. It looks like Microsoft did it’s part and is actively pinging non-Microsoft devices to get content… it’s trying to be open and act like the hub of the wheel. Apple and Sony are both being closed platforms, and seem to be happy to do so. Blah.

Told ya: Whine! Whine! Whine!