So if you haven’t already heard, with the iTunes 4.8 upgrade, Apple has begun selling video content through the iTunes store. I bought the latest Dave Matthews Band album, Stand Up, and it came with a video and a PDF booklet… presumably what would have been in the liner notes of a CD. The video and pdf files are stored in your iTunes music library along with the music.
When playing the video, you have the option to play it in the CD artwork pane, in a window, or full screen. Surprisingly, the video is not the new H.264 codec, it’s 3ivx mpeg4. When you click on the booklet, it’s opened in your default PDF viewing app.
Is this only the beginning of what will be sold through iTunes?
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Harrell writes…
“For the record, the videos on iTunes are NOT “3vix.” They are regular MPEG-4, encoded with Apple’s encoder.
The “3vix” QuickTime component is really poorly written. When installed, it totally takes the place of Apple’s MPEG-4 component, leading to mix-ups like this one. QuickTime reports that the videos were encoded with “3vix” when they certainly were not.
I’d recommend dumping the “3vix” component until whoever makes it gets around to fixing this huge bug.”
Thanks for the info Jeff.
