Movies to go!

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I know there are lots of people out there that don’t like the ‘Triple Play Editions’ that have come about since the advent of Blu-ray. I think a lot of people can see the use of having a DVD copy included. Not everyone has Blu-ray players all over the house, you may want to watch the film in the bedroom where you only have a DVD player. From reading various DVD forums on the net I know that there are many digital copies that go unused. Personally I’m a sucker for a digital copy. I like the idea of being able to carry about a small collection of films on a portable media player (iPhone in my case). How can you stand to watch a film on such a small screen? I actually don’t mind. Plug in some decent noise isolating headphones and on the train, plain, waiting for the wife to buy shoes, even in a really boring lecture at a conference once (I was discreetly sat at the back of the auditorium) I’m transported off to the wonder that is Hollywood. It isn’t ideal film viewing and I wouldn’t want to see a film for the first time this way, but for some old favorites it’s great.

Couple of problems with this new phenomenon. I now have an iTunes that has 82 films in it with each film averaging in at about 1.2Gb, so I’m up around 100Gb of films. Not too much of a problem yet, I think my hard drive is about 500Gb, but give it while and I’m going to be running out of space. At least external HDs are much cheaper now, I picked up a 1.5Tb one the other week for just less than £100 (e-sata one as well), so it’s not really that much of a problem, I’ll add on an external drive and shunt all the films over to that. The other problem is at the playing end, on my iPhone. Storage and lack of. Now I went for the 32Gb iPhone 4 which is the daddy of the iPhones so there’s nowhere to go from there…yet. When i first got it I’d only got a few apps so the majority of storage was free for movies. I used to carry around at least 20 films with me. I used to have the entire Star Wars saga and Lord of the Rings trilogy in my pocket (ripped from DVDs can’t get digital downloads of those yet). Now nearly a year on and I have over 14Gb of apps (note to self, stop downloading flippin’ games!) 5Gb of music and a load of photos that now means I can only sotre about 5 films. Where will my salvation come from? iPhone 5….. well according to the rumours, it’s not very likely!

After successfully resisting apple products for so long (in early MP3 players I went for iRiver over iPod) I eventually got drawn in with an iPod nano. I actually can’t remember why I bought my first iPhone (3GS). I think it was because I’d had a couple of basic cheap phones and was sick of them and wanted something a bit more fancy, oh what a fool! 2 years on and I’m now well and truly hooked! I’ve got apps that I couldn’t live without, I’m locked in and can’t ever see me being able to use any other phone and this is what they want. Like a crazed addict in need of a fix I check the internet news every day for new rumours on the upcoming iPhone 5 release. Will it be all that I want it to be? Time will tell, but it’s not looking good.

What do I want in my shiny new portable media device? I long for the day when it can be for films what the early mp3 players were for music. To be able to carry around hundreds of films in my pocket that I can view at any time, heaven! What am I looking for in the short-term? Not a lot really, faster processor and more RAM would be nice, but the main thing for me is more STORAGE. I absolutely need 64Gb minimum but 128 would be much nicer. Will I get it? Well there are a few rumours saying 64Gb is on the cards as there’s already a 64Gb iPod Touch, but with the announcement of iCloud Apple seem to be trying to move away from onboard storage and storing everything in the cloud (won’t my songs get wet in there?). On the surface this sounds great, I can get rid of the 5Gb of music I carry around with me and stream from the cloud…. if i have a decent and reliable internet connection anyway and that is where it starts to fall down. My 3G signal comes and goes depending where I am so if you absolutely want your music then you still need it stored locally. No way can you stream a movie from the cloud. Maybe when the new 4G network comes online (we seem to be behind the Yanks on this one, don’t think we’ll have one ’till about 2014) but again, you’re going to need to stay in places with good 4G signal.

When I first got my first mobile phone in 2000 (some crappy Philips phone), if you’d have shown me an iPhone and all the things it can do I’d have been flabbergasted. Looking into the future I can see a time when I’ll carry films around with me as we currently do mp3′s, then my greatest problem will be choosing which of the thousands of films in my collection to watch. For now though I’m going to have to live with an iTunes that taunts me with the 77 films I can’t take with me while I agonise over the 5 films I should transfer trying to anticipate what I’ll want to watch the next time the wife’s in Clarks!

Do you like a digital copy? Where do you see the future of home video?