Now me personally, I don’t have either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Now that HD DVD is dead, all that’s left is Blu-ray — but wait, could there be another competitor on the horizon? Many people have been talking after the death of HD DVD, some saying Blu-ray is not in the clear yet and in fact might not have much of a victory at all. It appears that all these people are pointing at Apple. Apple, the one already covered in blood from the death of many digital download stores and/or media players.

Companies below either closed shop entirely, or discontinued a product:

Yahoo!, Virgin, MTV’s Urge, AOL, MSN, BenQ, Rio, Dell, iRiver, Thomson, Olympus, BuyMusic.com, TowerRecords, Sony’s Connect, Google Video, and Wal-mart.

Now Apple is a company that has created many industry standards; it’s considered by many as the “trend setter.” It’s made the mouse a standard (1981), USB a standard (1998), developed FireWire as a standard (1995, 2000), optical mice a standard (2000), super drives a standard (1988, 2001), the modern laptop design a standard (1991), 16+ million colors (24 bit) on screen a standard (1987), Wi-Fi a standard (1999), etc., etc., etc.

So what I’m getting at is Apple is trying to set a new standard. Steve Jobs has pointed this out many times directly and indirectly. He has pointed out the decline of optical disks and the increase of digital downloads. He shared his vision in which everything could be downloaded digitally. You see Apple wants to get rid of the concept of physical storage devices like the optical disk (not SSD or HDD, of course). Knowing Apple, I could seriously see the fading of optical disks in just a few years, and I could also see Blu-ray not lasting very long.

When Apple makes a change, it takes six months to as much as 10 years, but soon the industry follows its lead.

As BYTE Magazine said back in December, 1994 (link):

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”

“It’s no coincidence that every new version of Windows looks more and more like the Mac.”

“In 1984, critics derided the Mac for its appliance-like simplicity, but it went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing: the GUI, desktop publishing, built-in networking, plug and play, integrated multimedia, API-based software development, visual programming, hypertext, 24-bit color, the global clipboard, undo, voice control, built-in color calibration, dynamic memory allocation, SCSI, and even 3 1/2-inch floppy drives.”

“Apple’s R&D lab, located in Cupertino, California, is the inspirational R&D center for the entire industry.”

“Apple is pushing ahead with some exciting new technology, and the industry would be much poorer without Apple’s technical leadership.”- this one has to do with the fact that Apple was dying at the time.

I could get more quotes, but I think this one source says it all. Apple is one of the biggest innovators in the industry and when it does something, whether it gets noticed or not, the industry shifts in its direction. So I really can’t see Blu-ray as a standard for very long. Congrats Blu-ray, on the victory, but your life will be short. Apple’s behind you, ready to strike.

Ever since the fall of last year it has seemed inevitable that Blu-ray would win. Warner Bros. said it all when it planned to only sell Blu-rays and to stop production of HD DVDs in May. Then Target stopped selling HD DVDs, and just recently, Wal-mart has stopped selling them.

Today it has been said that HD DVDs are officially dead and Toshiba is planning to stop production; the cost to scrap all the HD DVD players and materials will end up costing hundreds of million of dollars.

So, everyone that bought a HD DVD player, or who own an Xbox 360 with an HD DVD player, welcome to the wonderful world of obsolete, unsuccessful products. Sony’s Betamax has been here for a while waiting for you.

When the Apple TV first came out, I thought it was an okay set-top box. Over the first few months I saw nothing but good reviews, yet at the same time very few people were buying them. I do have to comment though, Apple TV so far has had the best results, selling about 800,000 units in 10 months, and that’s with very little advertising.

I personally have not been one that has bought one yet. I can’t find anything appealing enough about it to shell out $229 (was $299) for it. The new features in Apple TV take 2 have added some appeal. I can now watch or listen to podcasts on it, and I can rent movies.

The only problem with renting movies on it, is the fact that I’m one of the few people Steve Jobs didn’t count at Macworld when he said that most people only watch a film once. I normally watch a movie many times over again. So I really could careless about the renting part of the Apple TV.

Then there’s the new flickr feature. I’ll just come out clean and say, I don’t have an account there and I only go to Flickr when one of my friends gives me a link to it. I don’t know why, but I’m just not interested in it, just like how I don’t care about MySpace. The closest thing to Flickr I go to is YouTube, and that’s about videos not photos.

Now I recently posted an article about a new patent for the Apple TV that lets you watch broadcasted TV as well as live iChat with friends. This I would like very much. Now what I really want from Apple TV is the ability to use a wireless keyboard and/ or mouse, to have Safari built-in, and some form of IRC system to go along with iChat. I would also like a news feature that allows me to view current news, preferably video cast, but text is fine, and weather.

Finally there is one great Web site that should have been added to Apple TV, that being Blip.tv. What a great source of independent shows and clips, that would fit perfectly next to the YouTube channel.

Until Apple TV gets an iChat, Safari, and something like Blip.tv channels, I doubt I’ll get one. Maybe someday it’ll add something I like, but so far there isn’t much appeal at this point for me.

Today, around 47 Apple patents were posted today by the United States Patent Office. Through all of these, there was spotted an interesting discovery. Two new feature that soon might hit Apple TVs are broadcast TV and iChat video conferencing. Now I believe this will be a software upgrade for the Apple TV, at the same time I believe Apple will introduce a new Apple TV.

The reason I believe Apple will intro a new Apple TV has to do with the fact of a new remote, similar to the one now, but with 5 widget buttons on the bottom. Also with the new iChat feature, it might seem that Apple is actually making not just a new box, but an actual TV. Starting with the iMac G5, Apple now ships all, but the Mac Pro, with a built-in Camera. So they could make a screen with a built-in camera for this. Knowing Apple, they wont make you use some third party camera with the Apple TV (although they would probably allow it). With this information, and facts it seems like a 50/50 between Apple coming out with a television or they might bring back the external iSight camera. Personally, to me, I really doubt Apple will come out with a TV, I think the iSight external camera has a very high possibility.

Now the two features, live iChat and broadcast TV, aren’t just two separate features, they work together as well. You can for instance be watching a sports game, while chatting with one or more friends. The friends would pop-up on top of the broadcasted game, in a small window just like iChat on the Mac.

Here’s one illustration from the Patent:

you can learn more here.

Today Apple posted a press release.  It was about a new Member on the board of directors for Apple.  Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon, was added to the board.  Avon is the largest global corporation for women beauty products.  When I first read this, I thought this made no sense.  Then I read on, I found that she is also on the board at GE(General Electronics).  This really caught my eye.  As I’m a person that follows the film and broadcasting industries I know that GE happens to own NBC.

Last year NBC didn’t like Apple’s concept of payment for iTunes.  They wanted to make it more variable and even have some of there shows prices at 2.99-4.99 an episode.  Apple of course threw down this idea and NBC got mad.  Since then NBC has  left iTunes and become some sort of competitor to Apple creating their own system.  They also appear to be partnering with Microsoft, one of Apple’s biggest competitors.

Since Apple now has  Andrea Jung, Apple has some power over NBC.  This could end with NBC coming back to iTunes, a failing attempt to get NBC back, or just a simple coincidence.

For a very long time I’ve heard people talking about video formats and codecs and container files, but I’ve rarely heard them in the right context.

To start off, a format is used in two contexts. One has to do with video, and the other has to do with a file. A video format is about how a video is sent to a device and shown. You might kind of know what PAL or NTSC are, these are analog video formats. PAL is 25 frames a second and has a resolution of 720 x 576. NTSC is 29.97 frames a second and has a resolution of 720 x 486, although this is D1-NTSC. Most Analog televisions only show the old NTSC or 648 x 486. This is why shows and movies are “clipped” on a CRT tv, but show the whole picture on HDTVs.

Digital video formats include: ATSC, DVB, and ISDB. ATSC is the format that the FCC said will replace NTSC in 2009. This will finally be the end of analog video formats.

Now on to a file format. A file format tells the computer what it is associated with. A text file is in a text format, but if the text file was a binary format designed for a specialized program, it would be seen as just a document format until the application that uses it was found. Once found it would be considered a format that the application deems it, like a Mircosoft Word format. In Mac OS X, you would always see it as a MS word format since this format is built into the OS itself. As you can see it can get very confusing, and although this is a technology blog website, I’ve seen many people in places like creativecow.net get confused by this whole formatting business.

Most files have an extension, this tells you what format it is. This can also get confusing, because some formats have the same extension as others. I’m not sure about Windows, but Mac OS X doesn’t just look at the extension. If it needs to, it’ll look at the header in the file itself to determine what it is. There is also something called Mac Type/Creator for OS X applications. This helps OS X determine what a file is for with out using the extension.

The idea of a format is sometimes confused with a codec. A codec is a device or formula designed to compress a video or audio file into a smaller size with out losing to much quality. A few codecs include: MPEG, DivX, Sorenson 3, RealVideo, WMV, and Cinepak. The MPEG codec, which is at MPEG-4 part 10(H.264), is the standard and should always be used if you can use it. DivX is also a big standard, and considered the open standard of media codecs. There are also some closed source codecs like RealVideo. RealVideo is a good compression codec, but do to it’s closed system it is now fading away. A codec works by take each frame of a video or a section from audio, normally from another codec, and converting it to it’s own file format. The only way a codec can convert an other codec to it’s own is through a 3rd party like the Quicktime player. You can also find free applications online, they are normally associated as video converters.

As you see above, I should a few examples of video codecs, but there are a few missing like MOV. This is because a file like: MOV, ASF, AVI, MP4, IFF, Ogg, OGM, and 3gp are not codecs. These are called containers. A container file is like a virtual disk(iso,dmg, etc), it holds a number of codecs inside of itself. This is the number one place that people get confused. When someone says “The MP4 format” what they mean is “The MP4 container format”. Just about every container format today is based off of IFF. IFF is the first platform independent format, it was created by Electronic Arts(EA) in 1985. Now IFF isn’t necessarily a container format, it’s actually a generic format. Generic means it can be used in many different ways, one of which is as a container.

Apple created one of the first multimedia APIs for computers(Apple computers only), called Quicktime. Intel was astounded at how a video could be played on a computer with only a Motorola 68K processor. The file format quicktime understood was MOV, this allowed people to add almost any media format to a MOV file and play it back as a movie or even as an interactive application. Quicktime even had it’s own qHTML format(failed), which today is only being used by Apple themselves. To compete, Microsoft entered the field with “Video for Windows”(the Quotes are to show this is the actual name of it) a year later. With it Microsoft came out with the AVI container format. It was based after the IFF format, and was designed only to playback media. It had to use Windows’ drawing API which meant very low quality and high processing power. It soon failed against quicktime until 1994. MS had acquired, unofficially, the API of quicktime. Suddenly Video for Windows was running as good as Quicktime. Apple investigated and found this out. After going to trial Apple won in 1997.

After this Microsoft started work on a new container format called activeMovie. This format was much more superior to AVI and Video for Windows. To help with this, Microsoft bought WebTv. WebTv was partly founded by Bruce Leak, a pioneer developer of Quicktime who left Apple. Using this asset, they created a new container format called ASF along with WMV/WMA. In 2000 Microsoft went to the Motion Picture Group(MPG) to make ASF a standard, but instead MPG choose Quicktime’s MOV format. A little later MP4 came out based on MOV.

At this point AVI is a big standard in the opensource world, ASF is still not widely used, and MOV is the standard container format in the media world.

So to rap up: A “video format” means how a video is shown or rendered on a screen or television, a “file format” tells a computer what to do with the specified file, a “codex” is used to compress a file into a smaller size with out losing quality or in some cases data, and a “container file” is used to house many different codecs in one file.

side-note: I hear a lot of people saying “Codex” and not “Codec”. A Codex is something entirely different.

Oxford Dictionary for the word Codex: “an ancient manuscript text in book form.” 16th century

Oxford Dictionary for the word Codec: “a microchip that compresses data to enable faster transmission or decompresses received data.” 1960s