Hidden Feature Makes iPodtouch and iPhone Physical Storage Limitations (a bit) Obsolete

The iPodtouch’s physical storage limitation of 16GB enraged a lot of people.  Why?  Most were worried that they wouldn’t be able to store much of the video that they wanted to watch on their beautiful new 480×320 screens.  However, Apple allows you to play movies over the net.  Don’t believe us?  Point your iPhone/iPodtouch browser over to:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/iphone

Yep.  Links to Quicktime movies.  Full 480×320.  Full stereo sound and amazing video clarity.  They also start up right away and play fully without having to catch up if you are on relatively speedy Wifi enabled Internet connection.

So what is stopping us from taking our incredibly diverse .mp4 movie collection and putting it on the web?  Not much really.

Just point your Web Server directory to the folder that has your media files.  No index.html page necessary – just enable directory listing on the webserver and allow the web browser to open the mp4 files.  Now we have an iPod with 2TB of storage.  

Technically, this can be done with music files and audiobooks as well.  Anything that is read by Quicktime/iTunes should be compatible.  Perhaps Apple should run with this on a Airport Extreme update?  This functionality would be really easy to build in and make simple for the masses.  

As long as we are near some Wifi – which isn’t that infrequent!  Now Bring on the 3G iPhones!