{"id":84,"date":"2006-01-07T16:33:13","date_gmt":"2006-01-07T23:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2006-01-08T12:56:27","modified_gmt":"2006-01-08T19:56:27","slug":"fake-video-with-itunes-chapter-markers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/84\/fake-video-with-itunes-chapter-markers","title":{"rendered":"Fake Video with iTunes Chapter Markers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day as I walked home from the gym, listening to my iPod Nano, I started to feel jealous of the iPod Video owners. I love my Nano, but it would be cool to be able to watch video on it from time to time. In spite of having a pretty good color screen, I have no access to such a feature (except perhaps with some Linux-on-iPod trick).<\/p>\n<p>\nThen I got a sick idea. What if I could convert the frames of a video into chapter markers in an iTunes AAC file?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nYou may be familiar with chapter markers: they allow authors of multi-part AAC audio files to put marker points in the file so that you can skip between different sections of the audio, even though it&#8217;s all part of one file. When you play a song or audio file on your iPod that includes these chapter markers, you can also see an associated image for each chapter.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo, I set out to create an AAC file with <em>lots<\/em> of chapters. Of course the mechanics of this are a bit harder than it sounds. I had to master Apple&#8217;s weird &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/applepodcast\/podcasts\/Resources\/static\/podcast_chapter_tool_beta.dmg\">ChapterTool<\/a>&#8221; (the only official Apple software I know of distributed through a .Mac homepage!), came up with a funny perl script to generate the XML input file that ChapterTool requires, and relied heavily on a modified version of David Van Brink&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omino.com\/~poly\/software\/qt_tools\/\">qt_tools<\/a> and Pixture Studio&#8217;s awesome <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macupdate.com\/info.php\/id\/11532\">QuickImageCM<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI hacked on this for several hours today and finally came up with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.punkitup.com\/BarstoolEnhanced.m4a.zip\">pretty interesting demo<\/a> (10MB). The linked file contains a 3.5 minute song with 800+ chapter markers. The result, as viewed in iTunes, is &#8220;somewhat video-like!&trade;&#8221; I can&#8217;t figure out yet whether the slight jerkiness is because iTunes is not used to flipping chapter art so frequently, or because I screwed something up in the time code generation for the XML file.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThough the file behaves fairly well in iTunes, all hell breaks loose when I try to play the file on my Nano. The Nano sort of freezes for a minute before giving up and skipping to the next track. I guess Nano just isn&#8217;t ready to deal with that many chapters in a song file! I tried scaling back my experiment quite a bit by reducing the number of chapters to just one per second. While Nano is now able to play the song, it is rather flaky about keeping the displayed image up to date with the chapters as they fly by.  Another major drawback to this &#8220;solution&#8221; is that having all those chapters on the song essentially makes it impossible to skip to the end or beginning of the track while it&#8217;s playing.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo while my dream of hacking video onto my Nano via iTunes is not exactly fulfilled, I think too much went into this not to share the (probably good) news of my failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day as I walked home from the gym, listening to my iPod Nano, I started to feel jealous of the iPod Video owners. I love my Nano, but it would be cool to be able to watch video on it from time to time. In spite of having a pretty good color screen, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}