e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[FGATOR]

DivX for Grandma: a review of Alaska Air's video iPod


http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/05/divx_for_grandm.html

DivX for Grandma: a review of Alaska Air's video iPod
There has been a lot of speculation in the last year about when a personal video player would go mainstream in the US (they're pretty popular in Japan already), and many are waiting for Apple to take the lead and expand the iPod to serve video. Well, as I found out on a recent cross-country flight on Alaska Airlines, the technology is already here and it's pretty useful.

The digEplayer

The main interface

I'll admit that it's not the most cutting-edge development, as personal video players have been seen in first class cabins for a few years now, and personal DVD players can be rented for one-way use at many airports. When I heard them mentioned at the start of my flight, I figured I'd pay the ten dollar charge (they're free in first class) and see if watching a movie on a small screen was comfortable and what types of music was offered. What eventually piqued my interest about the device was the technology being used.

After we got up to a safe altitude the attendents passed them out and as I was looking over the device I noticed something curious on the back. See for yourself:





Highlighted area states "Content encoded by DivXNetworks, Inc."


I was surprised but impressed that a company called e.Digital had adopted an emerging internet video standard for consumer applications, figured out the studio licensing maze, and sold their services to a major airline. Compression formats like MP3 and DivX were popularized by underground internet trading networks but they've historically been difficult to use and the domain of expert users. In the past couple years however, consumer devices have fought Hollywood industry lawsuits in order to make those formats easy to use. In effect, e.Digital has created the first DivX player my grandmother can use. Kudos to the design team.

Looking inside and taking it for a spin
The device was called a "digEplayer 5500" and was easy to use with a directional wheel, play/pause/seek video controls, brightness and volume controls, and a couple navigation buttons. The display was a widescreen LCD around 7" in size. The main menu offered movies, sitcoms, and music, in addition to some airline info. The player was about the size of three iPods side by side, but still smaller than a laptop. It was about an inch thick and only weighed a pound or so.





Playing movies on the device


The amount of content on the device was more that I would have guessed could fit. There were nine full length movies (three recently in theaters, the other six were common video rentals from the past 2-3 years), three TV shows (including the Simpsons!), and a selection of 10-15 songs in ten different genres. That's roughly 15 hours of video and about 6 hours of music. I would assume the player was hard drive based, to hold that amount of data (a 20Gb laptop drive would be my guess).





Browsing the available music


Movie and TV show playback was smooth, though the content was formated for a standard 4:3 tv set, and widened to fit the 16:9 screen on the handheld (which seems dumb, but I recognized the same "this movie has been formated to fit this screen" message at the start of films I've rented in fullscreen format, so they probably just ripped DivX versions of rental market films. I watched the Simpsons episode ("Lisa Gets an A") and Master and Commander in full. The screen was bright and crisp, and looked great in daytime light and during action sequences.

After I was done with the movie and show, I turned the device off to poke around a bit. The back pointed out it cleared FCC regs for home and office use, but other labels said it was limited to only commerical use on Alaska. Aside from the headphone jack on the side and a taped over DC power jack, the only other opening was a side door. I cracked it open and found what appeared to be a black cartridge-type pack. I believe it was the battery pack, though I couldn't get it to budge no matter how much I wiggled on the small strap sticking out of it. There's got to be a way to easily exchange content on the device for new films and music, but I could find no evidence of docking mechanisms. Perhaps the black brick was a removable hard drive. On bootup, the screen revealed it was running the "MicroOS 3.1".





The side view, with the panel open




Impressions

Overall, I had a great time using the device and it helped my five hour flight feel a lot shorter. Steve Jobs has said in the past that watching video on tiny screens was a bad movie experience, but I have to say it wasn't that bad for me. I had never seen Master and Commander before and I'm sure I would have enjoyed the epic's cannon blasts if they were on a 80 foot screen, but I still felt the suspense and action on the small monitor. By exposing airline passengers to this device, you get to see regular folks enjoy small, portable types of entertainment. And it makes sense to use a portable instead of installing screens in every seat (same could be said about in-car DVD systems, why not make them portable instead and entertain people in any car?).

What impresses me most from this device is that it appears to be a low cost box built with commoditiy parts, and it takes advantage of content encoding that was developed in the illicit world of online media trading. Small LCD screens are cheap (you can find a 5" LCD for around $50 on ebay), mp3 and divx decoders are just a few bucks for the chips, and laptop hard drives are readily available (they can be pricey though). Combined with a simple user interface, this device takes all the complexity of movie codecs, P2P networks, and file metadata, and turns it into a system that non-technical adults can enjoy.





The back of the device




Conclusions

After playing with the digEplayer for a few hours, I'm wondering why these units aren't widely available for movie and television show fans. The most obvious reason would be that Hollywood doesn't want you to make a copy of your purchased DVD for your handheld, nor do they want you to download a TV show you taped for playback on another device. I've long held that instead of calling Kazaa users criminals for going to such great lengths to find shows, songs, and movies they enjoy, content industries could instead be calling them customers (highly motivated customers, at that). Apple proved that if you gave people a reliable, speedy, easy-to-use source of music at a reasonable price, people would rather pay the small fee than go through the effort of obtaining free songs. There is MovieLink for films, but every review I've seen of the service talks about the hard to use software that only runs on certain configurations. Currently there's no easy way to get digitized TV shows other than searching underground networks for it.

It's clear why this device is only available for rental in a commercial setting -- Hollywood hasn't yet figured out a model they're comfortable with for distributing content to customers. The only barriers are social and legal, as the technology is already here.