The iPhone, HD Video, And iTunes 8 Rumors

[Gizmodo] To add a little more fuel to the iTunes 8 HD Content fire, Gizmodo is running with a theory that the iPhone currently has the power to play H.264 1080P video, and that Apple may give the yet to be announced iPod upgrades this ability as well. Why would you want to play HD content on your iPhone or iPod? Even they don’t have an answer for that, other then with the right adapters you could potential hook your device up to an HDTV and view the content way. If this is true what does this mean for Apple’s hobby, the Apple TV.

Head on over to Gizmodo for the full story.

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Comments

The ability to play HD content on your iPhone/iPod Touch would mean that they could expand their HD rental business to these devices. This would probably also mean they would allow rentals on Macs; I believe the only reason they do not currently allow this is to help alleviate customer confusion in the iTunes store (I can only imagine how many people would rent the HD version if it were available in the iTunes Store and then complain when it wouldn’t work on their iPhone).

In all honestly, you won’t see any benefit from the resolution increase, but you’ll have more options with your files if they allow HD content onto the iPhone platform.

Oh, and hopefully they would let you output via iPhone and iPod Touch via component cables, although I’m sure the MPAA wouldn’t like that too much.

The reason why HD content isn’t available on the Mac, and *is* on AppleTV, is because the AppleTV design supports HDCP and the Mac and computer displays don’t… Unless you can provide content protection for the studios, you will not see HD content on these (unprotected) clients.

As far as HD on the iPhone, I’m no sure I see the point. OTOH, if all the video DRM issues could be solved on the Mac side, then the confusing mishmash between non-transportable AppleTV content vs iPod/iPhone/Mac content, would be eliminated in one swift stroke… That would be heaven, but I’m dubious of the possibility.

I think if this is true that we are missing the key part - there was a patent recently where Apple had a way to stream content via wifi to your iPhone/iPod touch. If there is wifi on the new iPods coming out this would make sence. You would be able to watch the video streamed to your hand held media device without storing it on it and the quality could be downgraded to fit the specs on your device before its streamed.

Here is were it would get good. The same 1080P video could be streamed to your device at full quality while it was hooked up to a special hub that has HDMI out to your TV - same with AppleTV (speculating a new version will be capable of 1080p and older AppleTV’s would have a the 1080p video downgraded to 720p on the computer before its streamed to the AppleTV).

Thats my guess anyway:)

I think one of the biggest adavantage would be that I can have just one file and can watch it in the best possible resolution on my ipod and on the Apple TV. Also I can encode video material in the best quality and not twice for ipod and Apple TV quality.

I’m extremely pissed with apple. The iphone 3g doens’t support it’s own hd video podcasts - I also downloaded an mp4 movie from a different site - and THAT won’t import into itunes.

Apparently only a “specially encoded” particular type of mp4 is allowed.

Are they trying to fight piracy?
I thought everyone threw the towel in on that one.

The Market has changed - adapt with it. Stop fighting the current.

I WILL NEVER PAY…..for downloaded movies. hahahhaha

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