Nyko iPod Movie Player
TUAW sister blog Engadget posted a look yesterday at a product due out this November to turn the iPod into a digital video player. Despite the uninspired name, Nyko's "Movie Player for iPod" looks like a really neat little gadget to fill in the gap left by Apple in iPod video support. Essentially, it will use the iPod as a pluggable hard drive to store video and then read it into the player. The video will be transcoded using a modified version of X Software's Video Vault, which should ensure consistently high quality, and support for a wide range of video formats. Output will be ASF, and users will have several options for quality vs. size. A high quality, 2 hour movie will run about 800MB and be suitable for watching television screen via the line out. At that size, you can take more than 70 movies with you on your 60GB iPod Photo.
The bad news for Mac users is that a Mac version of the customized Video Vault won't be available until February 2006 at the earliest, and while it will run on OS X, there's no word yet about whether the player will support HFS formatted iPods.
