Watching Modern Marvels episode on my iPhone

I bought an episode of Modern Marvels on iTunes for a couple of bucks. It took nearly 2 hours to download to my laptop over a DSL connection. What surprised me (pleasantly) is that it took only about a minute to transfer to my iPhone when I went to sync it up! I guess since the iPhone screen is smaller than the computer screen less data needs to be in the iPhone version.

This bears out since the download to iTunes was about a half a gig but the amount of space taken on the iPhone for the video was much less.

Video Quality
I picked an episode on the Golden Gate Bridge since my dad was born the day it opened (I joke that they opened it in honor of his birthday). I watched it while on the train to work listening to the audio through the ear buds. It definitely helped the time pass quickly. The quality was great. I like how you can tap the screen to show/hide the video controls. I like too how you can move to any point in the video by dragging this slider they have for that purpose. The color and resolution for a screen this size is great. Since you have the whole video downloaded and saved locally, the quality is obviously allot better than a youTube video you might watch on your iPhone.

If your thinking about buying/downloading TV shows or movies for your iPhone consider the following:

• Prices are pretty reasonable.
• Allow for plenty of time to download the item from the iTunes Store to your local PC.
• If you pause a download, and start it later, it will pick up from where it left off.
• Not every episode of a TV show is available to purchase.
• Again, selection of movies is great but not exhaustive.
• Moving TV shows or movies from your iTunes library on your PC to your iPhone doesn't take too much time. My estimate is about 1 hour of showtime equals 1 minute of sync time.
• The quality of the show is excellent.
• Moving to other applications on your iPhone pauses the playing of the video. When you move back to the video you can pick up where you left off.
• Video does take up much more room than mere audio. So be discerning about what you decide to place on your iPhone.
• Don't fill up your iPhone's memory too much or you might experience a performance hit.

Have you purchased video from the iTunes Store and downloaded it to your iPhone? How did you like it?

YUI Theatre: Interesting Stuff for Javascript Developers

In the previous post which shows a video where Joe Hewitt talks about his iUI javascript/CSS plugin, at the end of the video there was a URL that was displayed. I went there and...

There looks to be alot of goodness here that developers can benefit from. I'm going to camp out on this page for awhile and see what I can learn.

The URL?

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

If the Yahoo!Video links on the page don't work (due probably to a firewall) try right-clicking on the download.yahoo.com link and saving the Target.

Another neat thing is that these MV4 files are iPhone compatible. I wouldn't try downloading them over EDGE though!

NOTE:
After downloading the MV4 file to your PC, you might notice that if you double click on it, it doesn't know which program to use to open it with. I think if you have iTunes installed this probably is not a problem. I've got to check this. You still can open it though... in the Quicktime viewer. Of course Quicktime needs to be installed on your PC.

• Open Quicktime.
• Pick File/Open and browse to the spot on your PC where yous saved the MV4 file.
• Change the File of type to the setting All Files (*.*)
• Pick your file and click the Play button!

iUI Video

Whilst browsing on Ajaxian, I came across this video. I embed it here for your edification. For some reason, this helped me understand it abit more than mearly reading Joe's web page about it.