TSA videos MacBook Air X-ray. Mis-judges target audience.

by Nik Fletcher Mar 25th 2008

Earlier in the year, at least one blogger was stopped by ~~drooling~~ unprepared TSA agents rightly wary of the so-far-unseen beast known as a MacBook Air. Of course, the incident brought to the TSA's attention the fact that the MacBook Air might not be your conventional laptop, and that agents might mis-identify the machines as something more suspect. Thankfully, the administration responded, giving MacBook Airs the green light, and promised to try and X-ray a MacBook Air.

True to their word, the TSA has announced that they have indeed X-rayed an Air, and published a video for all the Apple-loving readers clearly wanting to gaze in awe at an X-ray of Cupertino's finest. By now you're wondering: "Why on earth is this posted here at Download Squad. I don't want to see no photos of a MacBook Air!". So here's where this tale takes a rather ironic turn: the video's certainly online, but for Mac-using fans (arguably the main target audience of the video) it's something of a non-starter because the video can only be found in the most Mac-incompatible format known to man: Windows Media Video - the antithesis of Mac-friendliness, surely?

If you want to check out the video, then be sure to download the Flip4Mac QuickTime components from Microsoft before heading on to the TSA blog.

[Via This Week in Tech]

Tags: macbook-air, windows-media

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Bufsabre said 9:05PM on 3-25-2008

am i the only one laughing the video is in WMV format when its about a mac?

Bufsabre said 9:10PM on 3-25-2008

sry what i meant was it looks like it was made with windows movie maker

aanidaani said 9:26PM on 3-25-2008

Is is just me, or were there no actual x-ray images to see in that video?

The Cang said 10:58PM on 3-25-2008

he said the images were have 'sensitive security information' so they can't be shown. hahaha, what bs.

WolvenSpectre said 9:51PM on 3-25-2008

Its not jsut a mac problem... I use VLC and Media Player Classic with the K Lite Mega Codec Pack over Windows Media Player. On XP SP2 I don't update WMP from 9 to 11. I had to use MPC with a special codec because without it none of my players would play the stream in the page or out.

I regularly get CBC WMV streams that play no problem, only the TSA video doesn't work. I wonder how they made the video that it wouldn't play in WMP 9?

TSA Bob said 10:12AM on 3-26-2008

Good morning. Bob here from the TSA Evolution Blog Team. It's probably burried in the comments on our blog, but I wanted to let you know we have uploaded our video content on YouTube. In the future, all of our videos will be hosted there. You can find our YouTube page here.

Thanks!

TSA Bob said 10:13AM on 3-26-2008

I guess I can't hyperlink. Sorry. Here is the link:

http://youtube.com/user/TSAHQpublicaffairs

Bob

MrMuggs said 11:20AM on 3-26-2008

TSA Bob: Nice video and I like the site! I had heard about a TSA blog but never looked into it until I saw the link here on DS today. Anyway, I wanted to let you know that at the end of the video you make a mistake. You say that the TSA blog website is www.tsa.gov "backslash" TSA. It's actually a forward slash. Sounds minor but I thought you would want to know.

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