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Soon We`ll be Watching High-Definition Video on iPod

Very soon a high-definition video will be available to watch on the iPod. San Carlos, Calif.-based ATO is working on a sleeve with a built-in LCD (liquid crystal display) screen that slips around Apple` iPod and turns it into a portable high-definition video player.

The company launched its first iPod video sleeve, the iSee 360, earlier this year and it has already gained popularity on the market. The video player will cost between $199 and $250 and will be released in five months. At first the players will be able to handle MPEG 4, Divx, HD.264 and other video format files. The device will have a battery, which will last for about five hours. Physically, the player looks like a sleeve. The iPod slips in the bottom, locks into a USB 2 connector, and effectively vanishes into the larger iSee.

The last couple of generations of iPods have used USB 2, however, plugging into the USB 2 slots of the different iPods is difficult because the physical implementations of the various versions are a bit different. ATO has had to adapt its product so that it will work with standard-size iPods. The iSee also divides the storage inside the iPod, creating an area that is for regular iPod content and another for content meant to be watched with the iSee. By dividing the hard drive or memory, the iSee lets users store video clips not encoded with Apple`s copyright-protection software.