On this topic, hundreds of DRM-Free are available at http://www.4Flix.Net All iPod-playable H.264 multi-pass MP4 encoded to boot.

What are your opinions on the quality of these videos?  I can say from my experience that the DivX you used to be able to find on Bit Torrent were better than Apple’s $1.99’s.  Why don’t any company do what 4Flix is doing but in the same quality as the high bandwidth trailers at Apple’s QuickTime site?  I won’t buy all my content just because it’s convenient fast food.

*I won’t buy all my content in lower quality formats

I’m actually very surprised with Google over this. If they were to choose any of the formats I would have guessed they might have gone with Quicktime, because of their pretty good relationship with Apple.

Quicktime IMO would have been a bad choice as well becuase they still would have needed to come up with their own DRM.  The only advantage to Quicktime is that it’s cross-platform-- which I don’t think Google cares about.

WMP seems like the logical choice for anything targeting Windows users as the DRM is standardized (playsforsure)and flexible.  WMP can play every format I’ve ever seen so I have to think that Google was trying to distinctly go anti-Microsoft with this move.  Their Google Pack seems similarly targeted.

The problem is… well, another proprietary video player? Don’t we have enough of these things? Seriously, I’m getting tired of this crap. QuickTime, Real, Vongo, WMP, now this. And none of them work with each other (except that you can play Vongo movies in WMP.)

Real player and WMP actually work fairly well together.  Real’s music store is now one of the choices in WMP.

Bittorent is really only useful if you have a popular enough show for someone to record it and encode it. I’ve tried to find stuff using bittorent and failed. Plus keeping up with the sites that host the stuff is a chore. And sometimes chunks are missing and you can’t get stuff or it takes a week. I can understand why people who go to iTunes or some other service and download stuff even if they had to pay. Three words: availability, convenience, speed.

Three words: availability, convenience, speed.

The fourth words are choice in quality.  H264 and other modern codecs are suppose to scale.  We ought to be starting off with a DVD of HD quality (when those are available) and have the choice to convert them down for hard drive storage and further for portable players.  I don’t want to buy a TV show or anything else, more than once, so it can play on another device, whether of the same brand or not and you shouldn’t have to either.  Bittorrent DivX are still not what we ought to demand as they are good enough but not superb (the best so far are the still illegal 4gb DVD VOB’s that are 1:1 copies).

Is diversity on your computer and favorites list for shopping good for this consumer or a headache?  I don’t want to go off on a rant here but…

From http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/01/13/194420 5.shtml

Those of us who haven’t paid for a DRM Google Video should acknowledge it is better quality than the previews and free clips.  Apple’s previews look better and I don’t think their music is signficantly downgraded.

Also, competing DRM formats, like in many business situations, can be frustrating in the short term but good motivation for innovation. 

The Free Software movement and the Free Culture/Creative Commons movement (the political wing of Open Source according to http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/0 6/01/13/169208.shtml) both seek to make available what you need and enjoy at no cost, except time and 31337 skillz. 

I want to soul-search and figure out why I’ve been so drawn to Linux this past semester.  On one hand, for the last year or more I have hundreds of purchased music (and 3 videos) in iTunes format and I love Apple’s UI for iTunes.  Yet I am still unsure this will be where the future of my collection and library will be.  Even with the CD burning allowance the quality you download is not CD quality and when I pirated the 320kbs MP3’s and later ISO rips of the CD were most respected, and I agree about owning quality on principle.  There have been hassles, where my family hasn’t been able to add a computer, even a Mac, the five allowed machine list for our Protected AAC’s.  I rip my brothers’ regular CD’s , except the ones they got from friends, without a hassle and I like YourMusic.com so far even though the selection is I figure smaller than iTunes’ 2 million or whatever and like in the pre-Napster days, singles are $5.99 discs. 

So it’s real CD’s for me, new from YourMusic or minimally used @ Half.com for around $10, and, for the moment, more rare singles from iTunes.  Netflix covers DVD’s pretty well.  To maintain my standards I have to run around more and I still don’t have the right device or solution for TV (time-shifting?) because industry pressure stifled innovation in commercial filtering/skip (e.g. earlier ReplayTVs had a 30-second button that even VCR’s have).  For the least worries, I think CD’s and DVD’s (of TV too), whether converted to your computer or not, are king.

Nice post, Bryan.

CDs and DVDs are king until HD DVD and DVD Audio are king.

How many times am I going to have to replace my audio and video collection? Ha!

Don’t replace them.

With spying software like this, this and this, it may be better to go with the good old CDs.

You didn’t make any sense. I was saying I’m going to replace my DVDs with HD DVDs and my CDs with DVD Audio. You then tell me to stick with good old CDs because iTunes asks me if I want to send Apple info about my music so it can send me purchase suggestions just like Amazon.com?

If you are comparing iTunes showing me music that relates to what I have to the malevolent spyware on Windows that you can get just from going to “shady” web sites, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s also off-topic.

I would venture a guess that Apple just wasn’t thinking when they introduced the ministore. Since then they have come to their senses and have rectified the issue.