Quality of Video playback on TV?

Originally posted by bobb-mini
It will still be 240x180, so the answer is SUCKS.

Wow, get the facts straight before you say something sucks.

Its 320x240 ... which is about the same for VHS tapes and about VCD range. I have my Mac Mini outputting to my TV and it looks good. Lost looks like how it should on an analog TV. There was a bit of artifacts, but thats because of the encoding. I could definitely watch TV like that though.

Just don't plug it in and expect HDTV.

So the quality IMO is going to rely more on how good your encoding is.

and last time i checked VHS is terrible quality

Originally posted by MOCKBA
Ok, so nobody checked it out yet.
Unnecessary.

You are not going to do magic with 320x240. Simply play one of these guys from your notebook/desktop to the TV and that's how it looks like.

OK, assuming you have EVERYTHING optimized, you have a super codec that improves your 320x240. The improvement will be marginal.

If you have going to view it on a 19", it maybe OK, anything bigger than that, fegitit.

And THEN it's subjective (as in what I find acceptable may not be acceptable to you). Confirmed by the difference of opinions here about VHS. I guess depends what you are watching. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Video, I want nothing less than HDTV resolution :D

On a 42 incher! Have you gone completely mad? Ever been into Best Buy and they are showing a brodcast quality video on a big screen HDTV - SUX BIG TIME man.

So no one really knows what its like hooked up to a tv? I have hooked my laptop up to my 36' HDTV, and the quality is, imo, very nice on it. I was wondering if the Video ipod has that kinda quality or not. I hate luggin my laptop up and down the stairs when I wanna watch something on it, on my tv downstairs. Also, I am out of space on my laptop, so need the ipod.

So, again, how is the quality? Anyone can get comparsion screenshots of a, lets say laptop hooked up, and a video ipod hooked up?

The iLounge review is now up. They were able to play 720 x 320 24FPS MPEG4 video on the iPod. That should display excellently on an analog TV screen.

They got some occasional artifacts at the resolution, but cutting back to 480 or 640 wide should still give excellent results on a analog TV screen...

Perhaps H264 will end up fine for content intended mainly for iPod viewing (plus has better compression). But if we can encode VGA resolution MPEG4 for movies, they will fit in about 1.5 GB or so, so you can store plenty of movies in good quality on an iPod.

I just tried it myself, both through my A/V cable and my iPod photo dock's S-Video output (both of these items were bundled with my 40Gb iPod photo which I purchased last year).

The testing was done with the stock Music Videos and Pixar videos available for purchase from the iTunes store.

I have a 120" LCD projector, and the video quality seems to be about the same as any analog TV station or VHS tape that I would watch. I have HDTV capabilities, but not every TV station I watch is in HDTV, so in that sense the iPod video output is comparable.

Personally, I didn't notice any significant difference between S-Video and RCA outputs.

Since the primary function of the device is not to be a video player, the quality is something that I'm more than content with.

I can play 1 Mbps 640 x 360 videos on my iPod. With 1-pass compression using HandBrake, compression quality is still iffy. But since it is being scaled down to 320 x 240 it looks great on my iPod.

But I think it should look a lot better with 2-pass encoding...if we can get good quality compression at VGA levels for MPEG4, it should absolutely excellent on a TV (close to DVD quality.)

32"... im planning on getting the cable and trying to rip som movies on to the ipod.

When I ripped AQUA TEENS to my iPod I was amazed at how nice and clean it looked (ripped at highest settings - only 70megs per episode). . .when I tossed it on TV I was even more amazed at how nice it looks.

Not being an Audio/Visual-Phobe I can live with the "quality" of the video as it looks fine to me -

This was a damn good purchase.

2 Pass encoding at 720 pixels wide... looks like a DVD on a Standard Def TV

Originally posted by EvilDude
Just wondering, how are you managing to play 640x360 on the actual iPod? Or do you mean that's the source that's been re-encoded to 320x240?

If you can play 640x360, I need to get the new iPod ASAP :P

The Apple specs are a little misleading. The max is listed as 480 x 480, but the reality is that you should use the total pixels as a limit (230,400 I think.) So for widescreen movies, the max resolution will depend on aspect ratio. I think 2.35:1 is the widest, and with that you can go to 720 x 306.

So the answer is basically yes, you should go out and get a new iPod! ;)

I haven't tested the same source material at different resolutions on a TV, but from looking at some 320 x 240 content (Lost) and some DVD test rips at higher res, the higher res does show up on the TV (as iPod Dance confirms...)

End result- the iPod is a far more versatile video player than originally thought. H264 will be fine for protected content and looks very watchable on my analog 36 inch TV, MPEG4 will be great for ripping DVD's at high resolution. Also, playback on the iPod is great either way- there are no scaling artifacts or anything like that.