Analyze: iTunes 6.0 Video Files
I had some change to blow from a previous gift certificate on iTMS, so I decided to buy an episode of Lost and see what interesting stuff I could find.
First, the main summary in iTunes:
I think the listed bitrate means jack (see below QT screen); very notable is that this has FairPlay version 2 DRM. Also, file type is .m4v.
Nothing terribly surprising here, although it's nice to see proper track numbers on a per-episode basis. I wonder if we'll lose the "Album" and "Artist" labels for TV shows in the near future, they seem a little inconsistent.
"Remember playback position" is checked by default, so they act as bookmarkable files. The "Video Kind" field is interesting; I obviously can't select a value here, but on the two videos I did have in my library (both episodes of Teen Homicide), I can only pick from "Movie" and "Music Video". It would be nice if I could choose "TV Show" for, you know, if I add my own TV shows.
Now, going outside of iTunes:
The path is unsurprising given the metadata (I use ~/Music/ for my music directory), so no tricks there. Failing to find fun here, I pulled it open with Quicktime Player:
Here we can see the proper bitrate (693.96 kbps), dimensions and framerate, and most amusingly, the metadata for the description of the track - which is totally unexposed in iTunes once you buy a show - or at least a chunk of it, anyhow. (This data IS available in the store, as the description.)
Above all else, I am fairly impressed with the quality, although like everyone else, I wish the video was a touch larger.
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Dan Dickinson is a 28 year old living in Jersey City, New Jersey. He works in the strange intersection of collaborative technologies, education, and medicine. His passions include finding unexpected paths and connections, music/rhythm video games, and backchannels. This has been his primary (vivid) weblog since February of 2000, seeing infrequent but overzealous updates. [more]
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Movable Type 4.2-en
How much did it set you back?
TV shows and music videos are $1.99 a pop.
How do you feel about the DRM as applied to these videos?
I’m generally opposed to most DRM technology, but have fully accepted Apple’s DRM on music… since for the most part the DRM never gets in my way, and if it did, I could still burn a normal, non-DRM’ed CD, and do what I wish with the music.
For videos… for now they will just play on a computer with iTunes or on a video iPod…. what if I ever want to transfer it to some other device? Am I out of luck?
What do you think?
The video DRM is remarkably similar to the music DRM; it’s unobtrusive, but it won’t play on other devices.
The upshot is, you can rip your own video to MP4 and it should play fine, just like you can rip music to MP3. Mark Pilgrim has a good guide on how to do this on OS X.
Hmm… That’s a pretty good deal for an entire episode. If this catches on a bit more and they get some stuff I want, it sounds like it’d be worth me checking out.
My only complaints about the whole iTunes video thing are:
Random thought I just had is that I wonder if Apple is working on some sort of iTunes-like app, but for archiving/organizing digital video, since as we’ve seen from above album/artist don’t really seem to fit (or possibly extending iTunes and renaming it).
what is the type/creator of the file. bookmarkable audiobooks are aac but their actual file TYPE is different, which tells Itunes its a audiobook and not justa regular aac. I’m thinking this is how they differentiate the tv shows, but i can’t download one in canada to test.
you’d need a utility like Kilometre (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11432) to get info on the file.
just a thought. thanks!