Recently Apple sent out a newsletter to videocasters explaining how to optimize their videos for the Apple TV. A lot of it was pretty basic stuff but one section in particular caught my eye. Apple suggests only encoding for the highest resolution iPod and says that’s good enough for Apple TV. I don’t think so, and frankly I think Apple needs to overhaul their device support for online video.

The thought process behind Apple’s suggestion is very sound. If a videocaster creates two versions of the same video, one for iPods and one for Apple TV, they they split the users up between the two formats. Rather than having one format with 5000 users you end up with two feeds of 2500 users each. Apple likes to feature popular videocasts on the front of the iTunes store’s Podcasting section and if you only have 2500 viewers then you may have to double your viewership just to get mentioned (these are made up numbers for the sake of my example). Getting promoted on other sites will be harder too since it will look like your videos are less popular than they really are. The second problem is that some users, like myself, have both the iPod and Apple TV. Which feed should I subscribe to? Having multiple feeds can be confusing to end-users, waters down the popularity of the videos themselves and becomes much harder to manage. This is all true.

iPod video is only 1/2 the lines of resolution that the highest quality Apple TV video can be played at, assuming 16:9 content. On the iPod we’re looking at 640×360 videos while on the Apple TV we can have 1280×720 video. You can imagine how much worse a 360 line video looks than a 720 line video being that 360 is under DVD quality and edging on VHS quality. This makes Apple’s solution less than ideal. As a content creator I not only want to make it easy for my end-users to get the videos, but I also want to show off my material in the highest quality possible.

The solution to this problem is not the responsibility of the videocaster. Apple needs to step up and change the way video is done across all devices so that they match, or they need to change how iTunes deals with video.

Lets first try changing all devices. Apple should update the iPod to include the same hardware h.264 decoder that the Apple TV has. Now an iPod can have 1280×720 playback of video which would allow us to discontinue our iPod feed and go straight to a 720p feed. The same video that plays on a video iPod would play on an Apple TV. The other advantage of this is that now my iPod is HD ready so with an iPod to HDMI adapter cable I should be able to plug directly in to my HDTV and get audio and video in 720p. The disadvantage of this is that 720p is not the holy grail of online video. 1080p is pretty clearly where the iPod and Apple TV need to be. How does Apple deal with this in the future? Update the iPod and Apple TV hardware to support 1080p? What about all the users of the old hardware that only have 720p support? Do we end up with two feeds again? I’m not sure this is the most ideal solution, but it’s better than having devices with different resolutions completely.

The second option Apple has is to change the way that iTunes works with video. Right now Technology Evangelist is working with about six different video feeds: 480p (iPod), 720p (Apple TV), 1080p, 3G phone, PSP and Zune. Imagine being able to drop everything but the 1080p video feed and have iTunes compress the video on-the-fly to the format that it needs. One feed from Technology Evangelist could drive any portable media player that works with iTunes, any media extender that works with iTunes and any local computer playback would be in the highest quality possible. The problem here is recompression time. Right now all iTunes has to do is move the file from your computer to the device you want to play it on. In this new model not only will iTunes have to move the file, but it will have to recompress it as well. The recompression can take ages. That’s where Cringely’s idea of hardware h.264 encoders in every Macintosh comes into play. Offload the h.264 onto a hardware chip so it can recompress the video in real-time or faster. Take that 1080p file and create an optimized iPod, Apple TV and computer playback version and we end up with a very powerful solution. We’re left with a distribution problem of online video being 1080p, but that’s for another article. What about Windows users, what do they do in this scenario?

Maybe there’s a better way to do RSS feeds? No idea, but I do know that what we have right now is broken and someone like Apple needs to step up and fix it.

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Today we start a new feature on Technology Evangelist, Ed Learns Video 101. In the course of our everyday lives we have seen a lot of video on the Internet, and unfortunately a lot of it is not done very well. These videos will be going over some basic video concepts to help make the videos out there more professional and less like bad home movies.

(more…)

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Ben and I were grabbing some tea at a Minneapolis coffee shop last week when Ben
spotted this guy working on a ladder leaning on . . . the wire.



Aaron Landry’s comment on my Flickr account summed up the reason for taking the
photos below:

We happened to have a
Canon
SD600 and
Canon
SD800 camera with us at the time. Ben took the same photo with both cameras
only seconds apart. Can you tell the difference?



Photo A:



 

Photo B:





We thought the sign on the building and the sky were less washed out in Photo B.
Notice any other differences?



The price difference is currently $75 ($249 vs $324).



You can find out which photo was taken with which camera by clicking on the
photos. The Flickr photo pages list the cameras used along the right column.

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One nice thing about blogging platforms is that they’re generally very search
engine friendly. This is especially true when it comes to indexing: search
engines have few problems finding every page in a blog’s archive. However, there
are a few things that can be done to make blog platforms even more search engine
friendly than they are off the shelf.



Optimizing Title
Tags



Every page of your blog should have a unique title tag describing what’s on that
page. This can easily be done by including your blog post’s titles in the title
tag field. Many blog platforms do this by default now, but they tend to do so in
a less than optimal fashion.



Your archives provide lots of great content for search engines. In fact, the
majority of the traffic to your blog will likely come through search engine
referrals where people click through from a search result to an archived page of
your blog rather than to the homepage. However, your rankings and click through
rates for each of those archived pages is largely dependent on how your format
your title tags.



A high quality title tag describes what’s on the page first, then describes the
site itself. For example:



Article Headline - Blog
Name



Yet many blog platforms lead with the blog’s name rather than the the post’s
name. The blog’s name should come second since that’s more likely to align with
the interests of the searcher. Every page of your blog will look more enticing
to searchers when they stumble upon it in search results. Including your blog’s
name after the page’s name helps users determine if your page is relevant to
their particular interests.



Below is an example of how to fix this on a Wordpress.org blog. The example may
not work for all Wordpress blogs since templates and versions vary, but it may
give you some direction on how to straighten this out. There are also plug-ins
for Wordpress that can help.

It’s worth noting that some companies have policies against optimizing their
sites for search engines. Yes, you read that correctly. Some companies have
decided that it’s more important to put their company name first in their title
tags. Personally, I think this is a ridiculous decision that hurts their
business and should only be done for one page of the site: the homepage. That
way, when people search for the company name, the homepage will look relevant in
the results for the topic of the page. Basically the same rule.



Let me know if you’d like to see tips like this for other blogging platforms.

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