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iPod touch 720*480 (DVD Resolution) update

shigzeo

shigzeo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 14, 2005
711
77
Japan
i remember the old days when g5 ipod had 320 video and then a year later with firmware update, suddenly the res was updated to include 640. well, following those lines, it would be so nice to keep my dvd's in the same resolution they are now and just be able to have the touch and phone downsample them for realtime use on the machines.

this would indeed be very nice to see. i reckon too, it will happen. what think you?
 
You do know that the screen isn't nearly big enough to handle the 720p resolution, that you might as well shrink them down to something that does fit, right?
 
shigzeo said:
i remember the old days when g5 ipod had 320 video and then a year later with firmware update, suddenly the res was updated to include 640. well, following those lines, it would be so nice to keep my dvd's in the same resolution they are now and just be able to have the touch and phone downsample them for realtime use on the machines.

this would indeed be very nice to see. i reckon too, it will happen. what think you?
Click to expand...

you do realise that to have 720p video the ipod would no longer be a portable mp3 player? the screen needs to be 1280 x 720 to get the res to work properly
 
i mean resampling... i do not like to keep two versions of my compressed dvds. one for the road and one for watching on computer monitors etc. i would prefer that the portable just downsample the image to fit on the small screen like the ipod 5g does with 640*480 content. low res itouch videos still look good on a tv or a computer, but nothing like they do in full glory.

it would be glorious to have the ability to decide to keep the width and height and use extra storage space or just to shrink the entire thing down to touch resolution.

seems silly to not have such capability unless the touch/iphone canot handle hi-res stuff internally.
 
There's also an argument for iPod as portable TV media source. Taking HD video with you that you can plug into a TV and watch at full resolution would be nice, even if HD on a small screen (regardless of resolution) is unnecessary.
 
sorry to slightly derail this conversation but... i just keep looking at this title under my name for this thread: thread starter. i have read this forum for so many years and in december 2005 decided to register to post. i think ive done it only a few times, but i finally begun something... it feels good.

yes, think about taking the ipod around and just plugging it into a hd tv (720 or higher) and having it look good, unpixelated and or just not having to reconvert multiple times to watch on different hardware. i would think that higher than 720 would be impossible but... there is probably not a good reason why it cannot playback 720 resolution now.

i certainly hope that the hardware is not the limiting factor. it will stop me from using it for video as i really hate to reconvert all the time.
 
Of course it's a hardware limitation!! - You need a fairly powerful PC to watch HD content. Let alone watching 720p content on an iPod touch.

Bottom line.... The processor certainly isn't up to the job of downsampling HD video, or even DVD resolutions for that matter.
Not to mention the fact that you have to convert whatever video it is you want to watch into .mp4/.m4v
If you had a DVD or a VIDEO_TS folder you have to encode it anyway so you can watch it on the iPod.
 
adamsweeting said:
Of course it's a hardware limitation!! - You need a fairly powerful PC to watch HD content. Let alone watching 720p content on an iPod touch.

Bottom line.... The processor certainly isn't up to the job of downsampling HD video, or even DVD resolutions for that matter.
Not to mention the fact that you have to convert whatever video it is you want to watch into .mp4/.m4v
If you had a DVD or a VIDEO_TS folder you have to encode it anyway so you can watch it on the iPod.
Click to expand...
Is this 2000? You don't need a powerful PC at all to run HD content...

Edit: Sorry, I forgot most people here have Macs, just as effective as a kid pretending to be a robot inside a refrigerator box. :)
 
Vigilante said:
Is this 2000? You don't need a powerful PC at all to run HD content...
Click to expand...

EyeTV 250 Plus System Requirements said:
Note: 720p or 1080i HD features require a Dual PowerPC G5 or an Intel Core Duo processor.
Click to expand...

(from http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/250plus/product3.en.html)

I'd say that's still a pretty powerful computer requirement for processing HD content...granted it's for decoding and recording in addition to playback, but it's still calling for an above-average computer.
 
Vigilante said:
Is this 2000? You don't need a powerful PC at all to run HD content...
Click to expand...

No, it's 2007 and this is a Mac Forum and if you want a computer that plays 1080p smoothly, you need a dedicated graphics card. Laptops start at $1999, desktops at $1199. Even the Apple TV can only do 720p, but since that's all the OP is aiming for...

What would be most ideal is simply that you could downsample resolution on the fly when transferring it to the ipod in the first place, so that you didn't fill up your ipod with unnecessarily large files space, but also have the option to put a file on their which was the max res that the HW could decode. The video out cable can do DVD res (progressive on non-touch models, interlaced on touchscreen models) so I'm guessing that's all you'll get. Even if the iPod could upconvert that picture on the fly to HD res (which requires more processing power than playing HD res natively), your telly's scaler would do a much better job.

I think what you want is an Apple TV and an external HD. Apple TV's will do 720p natively but if you've got 720p videos, itunes won't downsample the res for you so that your touch can also play them... yet. But then, itunes won't downsample high-bandwidth music files either, so you may be in for a wait.
 
gloss said:
Yes, but it's not going to happen on a 400mhz mobile processor where battery life is a concern, amirite?
Click to expand...
I'm not talking about on the iPod, that would be absurd. And a starting price of $1200 for a desktop that can run HD movies? You can make your own dekstop for that much, including an 8800 GTS and a nice dual-core processor.
 
Vigilante said:
I'm not talking about on the iPod, that would be absurd. And a starting price of $1200 for a desktop that can run HD movies? You can make your own dekstop for that much, including an 8800 GTS and a nice dual-core processor.
Click to expand...

This entire thread is about playing 720p on an ipod.
 
Umm...this thread seems largely academic, since regular DVDs are 480i (720x480 or less). Unless the OP is referring to the relatively scant number of HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs released. So, whether or not iPods could display 720p, it's not like you're down-converting from that to begin with.

Besides, as adamsweeting said, you need to encode video differently to run it on iPods anyway.

Not to rain on the OP for a first thread though. :)

Whether this could happen in the future is anyone's guess, and perhaps what the OP was getting at. But storage would be an issue: uncompressed 480i DVD is a couple of GB per disc; 720p would be much more. You're banging up again the Flash memory ceiling VERY quickly if you don't re-encode to a smaller & more efficient format.

(I agree - it's a pain - I have better things to do than dance with Handbrake every day).
 
dear me... i forgot to mention, just dvd resolution of 720 x 480, not 720 y. sorry about that. anyway, i would really like the ipod to be able to natively downsample from dvd resolution of 720x480. it is truly worthless to me to reencode in order to watch movies on the machine. i will not take the time to do that. id rather just fill up with days upon days of music. there are far too few movies that are worth encoding more than one time.

damn, im more of the audio geek, so i neglected to put the resolution i meant. cheers
 
shigzeo said:
dear me... i forgot to mention, just dvd resolution of 720 x 480, not 720 y. sorry about that. anyway, i would really like the ipod to be able to natively downsample from dvd resolution of 720x480. it is truly worthless to me to reencode in order to watch movies on the machine. i will not take the time to do that. id rather just fill up with days upon days of music. there are far too few movies that are worth encoding more than one time.

damn, im more of the audio geek, so i neglected to put the resolution i meant. cheers
Click to expand...

Ah! No worries.

TO THE OP: you mentioned once in there about your "compressed DVDs." Have you already converted/"compressed" them once to Mpeg-4 or H.264? I read something online about rectangular vs. square pixels, and how DVDs were 720x480 on TVs (rectangular) but only 640x480 on Macs (square) or vice versa...maybe someone else can weigh in better.

But the gist is that you should try to play those videos on a Touch (if you have one) & see if they work with the shrink/stretch feature.

Otherwise - if you're talking about "why can't it run straight Video_TS" - I'll repeat my earlier comment - storage would be the main problem with this idea.

Uncompressed 480i DVD (Video_TS) is a couple of GB per disc, and even assuming the processor could down-convert, you're banging up again the Flash memory ceiling VERY quickly if you don't re-encode to a smaller & more efficient format.

Whereas, I currently have about 50 hours of H.264 @ 600 or 750kbps on my 16GB, with a little room left.

Even assuming we see a 32GB Touch in the next 6 months, you wouldn't be able to hold many straight-DVD rips.
 
no, i am just meaning using h264 compression and keeping exact ratio and resolution of the dvd - rather than having to convert to ipod touch resolution or in visual hub to itunes resolution. i often watch with my computer and id rather have only one copy on my hd - the original resolution but compressed video and audio into h264 codec. why is it that i must either make two versions, one for the road and one for watching in good quality on the comoputer. it honestly looks quite hazardous on the computer in ipod touch resolution.
 
Vigilante said:
You do know that the screen isn't nearly big enough to handle the 720p resolution, that you might as well shrink them down to something that does fit, right?
Click to expand...

He's not suggesting 720p. 720x480 is 480p.

720p is 1280x720.


720x480 playback would be nice so that you could hook it up to a TV and have the full resolution; obviously the iPhone's screen would cut off quite a bit and squish down the rest.

It's also better for computer playback since you don't have to reduce it down to 640x480 so the OP doesn't have to reduce the resolution of his videos just for the sake of the iPhone.
 
God, you people need to learn how to read.

I agree with the OP, the 4:3 video is just plain stupid, along with the 3:2 screen. It is not about square/rectangular pixels, it's about actual res. Maybe full DVD res is too much for an iPod, but the main offering should be a 16:9 format to match with this frickin' century. This is for all iPods with video capability, not just the touch. Jobs really doesn't seem to be paying attention to the video world.

And I presume several posters mean BETTER compression with H.264. DVD is already compressed. Changing to MPEG4 means choosing new compression that is more efficient than what is used on commercial DVD.
 
I'm with the OP... I've been converting all my DVDs to h264 files for streaming to my TiVo (via a realtime conversion back to MPEG2 - this isn't as bad as it sounds, the quality is about what you'd get from a very good SD digital cable channel... not DVD, but it's just a kludge until I replace it with something better) or my Xbox360 up on the big screen.

The h264 files are between 1 and 2gb and are nearly indistinguishable from the source DVD (in fact, sometimes they come out better because the recompression smooths out some of the artifacting in a bad MPEG2 DVD encode - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes to mind).

Anyways, I store all my DVDs as 853*xxx (whatever the correct aspect is for that disc) which is the "full" width of the disc after the anamorphic encoding is 'corrected' (for the poster above who thought that the difference between square and non-square pixels had something to do with Macs vs PCs, it's not. It's just the design of the device you're watching on and the decoder that's playing it).

I would consider going back and re-encoding them (I'm only at about 75 movies and 15 or 20 discs worth of TV shows into the process) to a 720*xxx size if the touch would support it (at a reasonably high bitrate and acceptable quality level with the supported advance encoder options) so I could get a nice dock w/ remote and use the iPod for both my portable and home media player, especially now that the iPods have component cabling.

Apple would also need to enable some sort of wireless syncing/streaming as well, although I hear there's a few good 3rd party solutions for that. Anyway, I hear your pain, OP... if the touch could be used as a home media extender I would certainly consider one more strongly, even though the iPhone is a better buy overall.
 
haha, that is what i am talking about. am hoping, even if it comes in a year. i am not encoding another video just to throw away afterward. my itunes on this macbook pro was looking like this: lord of the rings, lord of the rings (touch), linda linda linda, linda linda linda (touch) etc etc.
 
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