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ABBA: The Movie Now Playing On
An iPod!
Recently completing a road trip from San Diego, California to Laughlin, Nevada
and discovering that my iPod's battery was no longer able to handle a little
four hour drive, I decided it was time to replace it with a newer model. Sure
the damn thing was loaded to capacity and still not big enough to handle my
music collection in its entirety anyway, but it had been a good companion for
two years and has revolutionized how I choose to listen to music.
Well upon my return home I researched what iPod models were available and I had
to admit that I did quite like the idea of color screens and being able to see
all the album artwork that I'd been tagging all the music files with anyway. But
I needed a large capacity player and still the largest is a disappointingly
small sixty gigabyte model. Sure no other brands on the market have reached that
size yet, but come on Apple, it's time for another larger capacity model.
Reluctantly, I went for the sixty gigabyte model knowing full well, even that's
not going to be large enough for my collection, but this one had some added
features of being able to play videos and movies.
As a curiosity, I thought I'd check it out. I looked in the iTunes store to see
what was available and everything seems to be fairly reasonably priced at $1.99,
but the price was the same whether it was a three minute music video clip or an
hour long television show episode. I didn't really feel like waiting for one to
download anyway, so I was curious if there was any applications to transfer DVDs
to an iPod, and sure enough I found a couple of options.
Since I was just looking to sample how it works, I stuck with the freeware. Some
of the options, which actually do give you a bit more options in terms of
transferring video to the iPod only would allow you to convert a five minute
sample unless you paid the fee to unlock the shareware. So armed with a program
to rip the movie from a DVD and a program to convert the ripped file into an
iPod friendly format, I was left to decide what movie I should try and copy.
Well as luck would have it, I finally got my copy of ABBA: The Movie in from CD
Plus in Canada and since I hadn't tried watching it yet, I thought let's give it
a whirl. The DVD ripped onto my computer with no problems and the iPod
conversion program took its time encoding the movie. It wasn't a fast process by
any stretch of the imagination, but since I don't intend to be using my iPod for
anything other than music and this one experiment, it was an exciting wait to
see if the movie would transfer.
Sure enough, the programs worked like magic and very soon the computer was
transferring my very first video to the iPod. And very shortly the only movie in
the iPod's list of movies was ABBA: The Movie. As I was on my way out the door,
the experiment was going to have to take place while on the road, so with the
iPod soon connected to the car stereo and the movie beginning, it wasn't long
before I was just enamored with the capabilities of this new iPod.
While I wasn't able to keep my eyes on the movie, I was sneaking glances at
every safe opportunity while traveling down the highway. I was just highly
impressed with the quality of the sound of the movie feeding out of the iPod. It
was as if the car truly was one of the best environments to be hearing the
movie. The songs roared from all the speakers and it truly felt like I had never
really heard ABBA: The Movie in its proper glory until now. It truly felt like
full surround sound, even though it would have been impossible to be so feeding
out of the iPod. Sure I used the DTS soundtrack in the conversion, but the
output from the iPod could only be two channel stereo.
The movie sounded so good that once I finally reached my destination, I just
stayed in the car to watch more of the movie until I couldn't stay in the car
any longer. But once I left the car, I switched to a pair of headphones, and
these aren't even my best pair of headphones. The magic of the sound in the
movie was still wonderful and now that I could really watch the remainder of the
movie I was certainly impressed at the clarity of the picture emanating from the
tiny little screen. There it was for all to see, Agnetha turning to show her
rear end at every opportunity and Frida and her eyes sparkling at every glance
at the camera.
Even though the screen on the iPod is very tiny, it was very apparent that a lot
of attention to detail was put in to the remastering of the movie. Just the
thought of being able to watch and hear the movie in a portable environment was
exciting and especially because of the music it was great to actually listen to
some ABBA while on the road. These days about the only time I listen to ABBA is
when they come up on random play of favorite songs on the iPod. After seeing
ABBA: The Movie on the iPod, I was certainly looking forward to getting a chance
to view the movie properly on my TV and surround sound stereo system, but
haven't yet had a chance to do that yet. But since the iPod goes with me
everywhere, I can watch bits and pieces of it or even the whole thing when I'm
on the go until I get that chance.
I was just planning on trying the video option just for the sake of trying it
and then deleting whatever videos I put on the iPod so I could keep the space
available for music in MP3 format. Somehow I think ABBA: The Movie will be
sticking around on the iPod at least until the 600 megabytes of space it
occupies needs to be reclaimed for MP3s.
Ryan |
