Galaxy S Tab: the (real) big iPod Touch?

Giz has a very unfavorable review of the Galaxy S tablet. But I point your attention to this image from that article:

That's an iPhone on top of a Galaxy S tablet on top of an iPad. For those saying the iPad was just a large iPod touch, I ask you to reconsider. Its a really good thing that Apple decided to get close to notebook proportions with the iPad and eschew the 7-inch form-factor, because otherwise you'd end up with what really is a big iPod touch in terms of use-cases / user-interaction.

Giz's review even points out that the UI of apps don't have to be changed at all to be usable instantly on the Galaxy S. Perhaps this class of devices (7-inch Android tablets) will be the iPod touch competitors Gruber keeps asking for. Maybe not though, since the media player type of device he wants would be sub $300.

Ars on HDCP Hack Implementation: "Pointless"

From Ars:

The software implementation should be able to decrypt a 1080p30 stream given a suitably fast dual-core processor and about 1.6GB of RAM. The poor performance is due to the nature of the algorithm. HDCP was designed to be cheap and fast for hardware manufacturers, but operations that are quick and easy in hardware are often slow and inefficient in software. In spite of this, the developers believe they have opportunities for further optimization and improvement, making real-time decryption on more modest hardware feasible.

Just wait until someone ports this to FPGA or custom ASIC, bearing in mind that Altera dev boards start at $200. Instant HDCP cracking. What's at stake here is pixel-for-pixel rips of ANY content that plays on your TV.

HDCP Utterly Broken, Intel Doesn't Care

I've been following this story for days now, and it appears Intel has responded saying that the master key that has been released is the real deal. From Ars:

Intel, unsurprisingly, said that it expected HDCP to remain effective. The spokesman told CNET, "There's a large install base of licensed devices including several hundred licensees that will continue to use it and in any case, were a [circumvention] device to appear that attempts to take advantage of this particular hack there are legal remedies, particularly under the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]."

In other words, Intel and the media companies don't care that their encryption systems offer only token protection and consumer inconvenience; all that matters is that the encryption systems are sufficient to meet the DMCA threshold for a content protection system: the threat of legal action, rather than cryptography, is their real tool against unapproved uses of digital content.

My thoughts exactly; by using an encryption scheme they knew was easily breakable and easy to implement, they can still claim they tried to protect copyrights with this technology so the DMCA applies.

They are wrong about being protected though; its only a matter of time before someone programs a little custom microcontroller or FPGA to use the key to make perfect digital copies of any content over HDMI. Then of course, they make all the code and PCB designs available for free. Hobyists and grey market peddlers alike will start making these things, and probably selling them on eBay. In other words, once something like this gets out, legal action won't be enough to stop its proliferation.

iTunes formats converge on 720p, and why aspect ratio matters

While reading some forums about MP4 authoring, I came to the realization that Apple has finally converged on one video resolution for all of its devices. This is pretty nice, since there will be no more iTunes video downloads that are two files, one for your iPods/iPhones, and one for your AppleTV; now, the ENTIRE video playing mobile line (iPod touches, iPhones, iPad) plus AppleTV support H264 MP4 at 720p.

Now, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all don't ACTUALLY have this many pixels on the screen, so your video format is always downscaled for viewing on these devices, but the format convergence is a huge enough of a benefit to offset this effect.

But the pixel mismatch is pretty huge too. In fact, the iPhone's/iPod's 960x640 display is two thrids the pixels of 720p, and after you scale a true 720p video to fit on the screen and take the aspect ratio mismatch (black bars) into account, your screen shows "540p" video, for only 56.25% of the pixels of 720p. The iPad isn't much better; it has about 85% of the pixels of 720p, but a 720p video on the screen shows up as "576p" with 64% of the pixels of 720p.

The point here is that aspect ratio really matters when you talk about video formats and video playback devices. Although Apple has converged on a format, they haven't converged on an aspect ratio, and it really makes a difference to your viewing experience. Now, whether or not they CAN do so is a hard question, but it makes for interesting food for thought. With several different film formats, SDTV, HDTV, DVD, recording equipment, etc. all having slightly different resolutions and aspect ratios, and with all the converting that goes on in the media authoring process, its still a big open question. For my two cents, the HDTV standards of 720 or 1080 lines in a 16:9 aspect ratio seem to be driving the digital video revolution we're seeing. Like Steve said the other day, people want to see TV shows, and they want them cheaply. Clearly ABC and FOX are on board for this 99c rental thing, and all of their shows are authored in 16:9 because HDTV standards are 16:9, and so this seems to be a reasonable aspect ratio to pick for the latest and greatest hardware platform. As another example, the majority of Netflix use I hear about is for watching TV shows, which are all 16:9. This aspect ratio also seems to kind of be smack dab in the middle of common formats. Its the least "wide" of the formats we consider widescreen, so its still okay for 4:3 SDTV content, and "anamorphic widescreen" formats don't have TOO much screen real estate wasted.

The problem with this reasoning is that its a tradeoff. Any aspect ratio a company picks for its hardware is a tradeoff between watching different types of content, and its really a sorry situation. What's truly necessary is for the film and TV and camera people to all get together on an aspect ratio; here's hoping that happens with 16:9, driven by the current HDTV zeitgeist.

Netflix comes to iPhone (officially)

Well, my previous tutorial was all for nothing: its been officially released! Hit up iTunes for the download.

Update: Netflix for iPhone with only iPhone and iPad!

I did something similar to the previous post, and it works! I did it without unzipping the IPA file; instead I transferred Netflix.app straight off the iPad onto the iPhone, and installed a user agent switcher so that the Netflix website would think I was an iPad. It just works! Jump after the break for better instructions. Enjoy!

1. Prereqs: jailbroken iPhone and iPad, with ssh running on both. This is in Cydia as "OpenSSH". Both devices should be on the same WiFi network.
2. On my jailbroken iPad, I used SSH Terminal to log into the iPad (from the iPad). Login as root (Note: if this is your first time ssh-ing into the iPad, the password is dottie or alpine; make sure you change it to something you'll remember using the passwd command). This is necessary because as far as I know MobileTerminal doesn't work on the newer iOS, it just crashes.
3. cd into "/var/mobile/Applications", then run a "find . | grep Netflix" to find the location of the Netflix.app folder. It'll be stashed in a directory with a long name.
4. cd into the long directory name from here, and then use scp to copy over this folder into "/var/stash/Applications" iPhone, something like: "scp -r Netflix.app root@IPHONE.IP.ADDY.HERE:/var/stash/Applications". You can find your iPhone IP address in the wifi Settings.
5. When it finished, reboot the phone.
6. Go into Cydia on the iPhone and install "User Agent Faker" from BigBoss repo (Tweaks).
7. Go into "Settings->User Agent Faker->User Agent->Apple iPad"
8. Go into "Settings->User Agent Faker->Applications" and toggle on Safari.
9. Log into Netflix.com in Safari and try and play an instant movie. Safari should go to the background and the Netflix app will come up and start playing the movie!

Netflix on iPhone

This is worth a link and quote so I remember how to do this in the future. From Lifehacker:

1. Download the Netflix app for iPad to iTunes.
2. Right click on the Netflix app you just downloaded and select ‘Show in Windows Explorer' if you're on a PC, or ‘Show in Finder' if you're on a Mac.
3. Rename Netflix 1.0.4.ipa to Netflix 1.0.4.zip and extract the zip file to your desktop.
4. Look for the Payload folder inside the extracted folder. In there you will find the Netflix.app folder.
5. SSH into your iPhone and copy the Netflix.app folder to either /Applications/ or /private/var/stash/Applications/.
6. Change the permission on the Netflix.app folder to 755. You can do this by typing chmod 755 Netflix.app, which worked for me, but it looks like some are having trouble. If that doesn't work for you, try: chmod -r 755 Netflx.app instead.
7. Reboot your iPhone.
8. Now go to the App Store from your iPhone and download a non-Safari browser with identification options, such as Atomic Web ($0.99) or Perfect Browser ($1.99). In Atomic Web, go to Settings and select Safari - iPad under Identify Browser As. In Perfect Browser, go to Settings and select Safari iPad under Desktop Rendering.
9. Still in Atomic Web or Perfect Browser, navigate to Netflix.com, log in, and find a movie to watch instantly. Perfect Browser will close and Netflix.app will start playing your movie.

Also from modmyi and vimeo!