DVD publishers had been experimenting with digital copies for some time when this disc was released. While DVD copy protection had already been defeated by late 1999, and tools to rip and convert discs to digital video were easily available (in free and paid versions), people still wanted a way to play their movies on other devices, like a desktop computer, portable media players, or home theatre systems. But users ripping their discs to create digital copies was still legally contested at best, and outright illegal at worst, in some countries. And most casual users of the format didn’t want to bother with ripping the discs themselves. DVD drives had already become fairly affordable ($40-$60 at online retailers) but hard drive space was still at a premium, and with a single sided DVD taking up to 8 GB before extracting and compressing the video itself - which also took a lot of time - it was just too much work.
Despite Serial ATA being an option, most consumers were still using older IDE disc drives.
Image credit: Newegg ad, Games for Windows Magazine #1 [December 2006], courtesy GameHistory.org
So when Apple released the 5th Generation series of iPods in October 2005, a few companies thought they could make some extra money by repackaging some older releases with a new disc that contained videos that would play back on them without trouble. And one of those companies was Delta Entertainment, which published budget music releases though labels such as LaserLight Digital, but that also sold public domain movies on VHS for decades, and which had recently moved on to DVD. Delta released these sets for The Lucy Show, Dragnet, two movie collections, and a repackaged cartoon set. There may be more, but there’s not much info about the company online these days. All of these releases appear to be from early to mid 2006, and they declared bankruptcy a year later. This specific release appears to be from July 25, 2006, if old Amazon listings are to be believed.
Several examples of Delta DVDs with bonus Ipod content included. Source: Various eBay listings.
Delta had previously released eleven volumes of One Step Beyond on DVD, with four episodes each; this particular edition repackaged 24 episodes across two DVDs (one of which is a dual sided disc), with an all new menu per disc. There are no special features, chapter stops, or even trailers for other releases. This release is extremely sparse, even for Delta.
The following captures were taken on a PC, using VLC Media Player:
A very basic DVD menu from one of the discs. There’s no special features included, and all menus are exactly like this.
Clicking on an episode name plays it back immediately.
The video files on the Ipod disc are in 320x256 resolution, which was the native resolution for the original Ipod Video, and have 44100Hz AAC stereo audio; the DVD footage has a standard 720x540 DVD resolution (which would be smushed down a bit for display on a 4:3 screen), with 48000Hz stereo audio. The quality on both is basically the same. The prints that were used in the creation of these DVDs were pretty worn out and damaged, with streaks, spots and tears at best… or extremely dark and fuzzy, as if taken from a multiple generation tape dub. The audio quality is also awful; the high quality encoding doesn’t help when the source audio is crackly and low quality.
So, is it worth buying these? Yes… and no. A good part of its 97 episodes have been in the public domain for years. CBS / Paramount released a set called “The Official First Season” with well, the first season and those are probably the best quality you’ll be able to find. The rest of the episodes are scattered across so many releases that there’s no good way to watch everything. And they’re also available on streaming… with horrifying upscaling applied.
This is an interesting curiosity, but nothing really worth owning in this day and age.