While most of the tech world obsessed last week on Apple Inc. and its coming video recording/playing iPod-shaped iPhone, your humble correspondent focused on the biggest issue of all regarding amateur video – compatibility of formats.
I reviewed the new InterVideo WinDVD8 Platinum from Canada’s Corel Corp., which should be described as a Swiss army knife for digital-age files.
First, some background. A big question goes begging as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates tout the coming meld of video, audio, high-definition DVDs, Windows-driven “smart” cellphones, Macintosh OS X-driven phones, home camcorders, PCs, Macs, stacks of DVD movies from Hollywood and other digital media content.
How in the world is somebody to use all that stuff from conflicting and competing companies with a mare’s nest of file formats?
The roll call of binary Babel includes formats such as iPod’s MP4 and H.264; Microsoft’s AVI, WMV, ASF and ASX; Apple’s Quicktime; Real Networks’ RA and RM; and Microsoft’s WMV-HD for high-definition television. Don’t forget open formats like DIVX, MPG, MP2, M2P, VCI and DV and MPEG-2-HD.
Jobs announced February availability of Apple TV, a box that connects Apple’s iPods to video players, and displays all of the media files acquired by the owner on either an ordinary home television set or an HDTV screen. If you can get it into your iPod, you can play it big screen using Apple TV.
WinDVD8 matches that kind of one-box-fits-all prowess and goes well beyond. The software can take over playing all of the media files that get loaded onto Windows-based PCs (Vista included) and display them in a very sweet interface.
At $59, the program earns its keep by smoothing out media playing for folks at home, at the office and for road warriors confined to airplane seats.
Say you’re watching a DVD on a plane ride and there are 45 minutes of video left but just 30 minutes to landing. You can input those numbers into a pop-up box and the software will close up all of the silent spots to deliver a passable version of the movie with speeded-up video but the sound track unaffected.
It gets better as the screen gets bigger. Along with millions of other Americans, I now have a flat-screen TV that has a connection for computer monitor cables along with inputs for coaxial cable, HD antennas, HDMI and so forth.
Loading WinDVD8 onto the computer I plugged into that TV set gave me far better control and far more variety in what I could play on the big digital screen.
On the downside, while WinDVD8 Platinum worked like a charm on my powerful main PC, I found severe problems running it on a computer just below the minimum specifications. The recommended hardware is an Intel Pentium dual-core processor at 2.8 gigahertz or above and an AGP or PCI Express graphic accelerator with at least 64 megabytes of memory.
In other words, WinDVD8 Platinum is designed mostly for people at the high end now and for the coming wave of Vista-equipped computers.
If WinDVD8 running on Vista-capable PCs seems like overkill, all I can say is that in technology, yesterday’s overkill becomes tomorrow’s bare-bones minimum.
