24 June 2005

Full-Length, Full-Res Movie Running off an iPod shuffle


A sharp-eyed reader tipped me off to this post by Wiley Wiggins on Video Thing (he played in Waking Life). He, I mean "his friend" apparently encoded a full-res, full-length DVD to the Quicktime 7 H.264 format and them copied and ran the 800 MB file straight off the shuffle over USB [2?]. Don't get too excited yet since it took 9 hours to encode but hey you can always "Set it and forget it". (And only one person needs to do this "these days" right?) He likened it to the feeling he got at the time he first started encoding CDs to MP3 for their smaller file size. He claims it is FULL-RES. Looks like H.264 might be a butt-kicker. (Now I sit and wait for the "shuffle with a screen" comments.) [via]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this a joke? Putting a DVD-rip on your shuffle qualifies as a "hack"?

Anonymous said...

Some years ago I made a special sound crafted to match the NTSC format that displayed an animated "horizontal" tunnel on a TV using my Mac Classic 22khz sound output. The resolution was about 1x240, in grayscale. Yes that's 1 horizontal pixel stretching as an horizontal line wide as the screen.

I've been thinking about resurrecting this project to be used on my iPod shuffle. I could make a program that converts an image sequence into a sound. With a simple cable you would be able to output (very low-fi) video directly from the shuffle :)

In theory, at 44khz, the maximum resolution you can obtain on an NTSC TV is 4x240 with 16-bit grayscale, 60 frames per second.

This trick would also work on just about any sound playing device, including a cassette tape recorder. Still it you be funny to surprise friends and family with that hack :) "Hey look, my iPod shuffle can show this cool animation on your TV!"

Fun for a few minutes at least! ;)