layout: post title: My first iTunes video purchase created: 1115799533 categories:

• Music
• Movie
• Mac

Video support in iTunes: check. Now off to find some video to buy.

Well, not really -- it happened by accident. I was browsing around and noticed that the Canadian iTMS had something new from Gorillaz featured.

Turns out that Feel Good Inc (Single Edit) is an album...because it comes bundled with the music videos for four other songs: Game of Death, Hey Our Toys, Jump Gut, and Tibet. In the interests of research (well, and it's a pretty good song), I paid my 99 cents to buy the "album".

You can check it out yourself using the iTunes link below (Canadian storefront) or read on for my description.

Update: AppleInsider talks about premium video content that you pay for directly, as opposed to the bundled freebies that I bought.

The videos are each listed as "Video -" followed by the name of the song, and have a little movie camera icon next to them. There is no preview, and the time is listed as 0:00, with the album being the same as the single.

Once downloaded, I figured out that these particular videos aren't actually music videos: they are little animated Gorillaz shorts. I didn't pay any extra for them since they were "bundled" with the song, so that's OK, but Apple will have to do previews, which currently don't work.

The downloaded files are MPEG 4 Video at 30fps, with an AAC, stereo, 48Khz audio track. The video's base resolution is 480x272. Weird...sounds like the dimensions for a small screen...

Even fullscreen, the videos look quite good. Size-wise, the longest video (1 minute, 20sec) was 15.7MB in size, or about 10MB per minute.

Doing a search for "video" in the iTMS doesn't pick up any of these files, so it looks like this is a bit of a stealth rollout.