The Hot Blog

As an Apple evangelist/apologist, I desperately wanted to love AppleTV. Sadly, it is not as revolutionary as I hoped it would be.

Presumably, it will get better with time, but that doesn't mean a whole lot to me right this second.

I'd rather look at crappy jpegs on my TV screen than attempt to watch an iKpliz clip. It's a hassle I know, but Dave can you do a QT on the Dreyfus one please? The broadband speeds in various locales just don't allow it to stream at all.

I just got the Apple TV and I really like it. Mine connects to my wireless internet and works like a champ, the only thing it's connected to is my television. It works on my non-HD tv just fine actually, but it works better on my HD flatscreen. But, I'm not using it for watching movies, I'll still buy DVDs. I use it for watching television shows which I've downloaded and the shows the air in HD show up in HD on my High Def TV, so it's pretty great. I immediately downloaded every episode of Heroes and it immediately synched to the Apple TV, so I did nothing but watch Heroes for the past two days. I think it's a great piece of equipment, but I don't think it's designed to replace DVD players, I think it's designed as an alternative to a TiVo.

I've had the AppleTV for over a week now and I'm happy with it. It's definitely not a miracle box, but it does what it does very well.

David, I think you're underestimating the video quality. I've ripped a few of my DVDs to try them out on the AppleTV, and at the right settings I can't tell the difference in picture quality. (The size of a full-length movie file compressed with AppleTV's native h.264 codec is about 3.5GB. Not small, but smaller than you would think.)

As far as movies go, the real mistake Apple made was audio. For some inexplicable reason the device doesn't do 5.1. There's an optical audio port, though, so this can probably be fixed with a firmware update.

It's probably inevitable that Apple will start selling movies at 720p eventually. That and a rental model will make the AppleTV very, very attractive. Until then, you're right-- this is an early adopter device.

However, as I mentioned, I'm happy with it. I cancelled my cable subscription. Everything I watch on cable is available on the iTunes store. Why pay $50 a month for a hundred channels I don't watch, when I can instead pay about $20 a month a la carte for the ones I do?

Most reviewers also overlook that the device can do music, as well. I've used Apple's AirTunes router for a couple of years now, and the AppleTV is a snazzy improvement upon it.

I don't mean to go on, but I've noticed that the sky-high expectations for this thing have led to some real disappointment. It's too bad, because it's a nifty gadget, the price isn't out of line with the competition, and it could get even better if it finds enough customers to make it worth Apple's time.

I feel stupid but I guess I never thought that you could rip DVDs onto your Mac or PC into iTunes and then use AppleTV to watch them. So you get a video library that doesn't require use of the actual DVD. In other words I don't have to get up and load the DVD player. Lazy I know but we are couch potatoes at heart.

I guess the problem here is that a DVD library takes up a lot of storage space so you would have to buy extra hard drive based storage. Or does ripping htem into iTunes compress them?

Do I have this right?

You can rip DVDs in both Mac and PC, but it's pretty tedious. There are people out there that do it, but I would never rip a whole DVD library-- I tried a few out of curiosity.

The files are compressed, as I mentioned, but still large enough to fill your computer before long. Until storage space is easier to install and manage, and until there's a more user-friendly ripping method, this particular trick will remain the province of tech geeks.

Now Dave, while I don't disagree with your main point, if you accurately state that a DVD has 10 times the information on it, how can you later say that it is "infinitely" better? One would think it is, perhaps, 10 times better, assuming that all that information is put to perceptible use.

A couple of notes here:

First of all, the Apple TV supports resolutions up to 1280, and it seems quite certain that HD offerings will come sooner or later. There's no reason not to require high quality connections without that being in the future.

And whatever the box says, it will work just fine with any TV as long as it has component inputs. A bunch of people have already gotten it working on old-fashioned non-widescreen-TVs. (If you bought a decent quality TV in the last five years without component inputs, well, better luck on whoever's extensive research next time.)

hy·per·bo·le (hī-pûr'bə-lē) pronunciation
n.

A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.

or the quality of a DVD is infinitely better.

Gee, I bought a $8 cord that connects my iPod to my TV. Lets me watch all the video I've got iniTunes, and play my music over my surround system

Sure, it's not wireless, but it takes all of 10 seconds to plug the cord in, and I can spend my remaining $292 on something else.

Incidentally, iTunes video content is sold at 640x480. DVD native resolution is, if I recall correctly, 720x480.

There's a visible difference, but calling DVD even ten times better is a gross exaggeration.

When I didn't have cable, I used to buy BSG episodes from iTunes, and watching them on my computer there was a clear difference between iTunes and tv (iTunes being vastly inferior). I can't say how many times worse it was, but 10X didn't seem like an exaggeration when I wanted to watch some of the cool battle sequences.

Until September of last year, the iTunes video resolution was 320x240, one fourth the size of the videos today. That is a definite difference. They bumped up the resolution when they introduced movies in the store and iPods with the finer displays.

All I can tell you was that I watched the Apple Store's set-up and there was digital fraying on every image I saw, whether animation or video or live movies.

For the record, I would call DVD infinitely superior to VHS now... but VHS is still better than what I saw at the Apple story because to my eye, inconsistent break-ups in the image are worse than a simple step down in sharpness.

What were they showing? The menu system doesn't do that, so I suspect it must have been a low-res or poorly encoded video.

(That's no excuse for a display model, of course, but I don't think it's a result of the hardware.)

I have to say...the Apple Store is a frigging JOKE so maybe you should look at someone else's example. I frigging hate that store...they're clueless.

When I was at SXSW, I lost the power plug for my Macbook. I took a $40 cab ride to the ONLY APPLE STORE in Austin and they didn't have a frigging plug. 300 iPod accessories and no power plug for one of their premiere products. They should just call it the iPod store.

Good God, Petaluma. Next time call ahead. Otherwise, we may assume 40 bucks and your time has little value to you.

Eric, did iTunes increase the speeds of their downloads, too? I just remember when I was downloading the smaller files before September, that it still took a really long time to download 45 minutes of content.

Dave I think you missed the mark some here. I just upgraded to a 52" HDTV after having the Apple TV connected to a 6 year old SDTV with component video input (required by Apple TV) for a week. It worked, but the Apple TV scales the content presuming a 16:9 display, and my TV had no 16:9 setting, that's the key thing for older TVs.

The content I have bought off iTunes and shown through the Apple TV looks better than my DirecTV SD subscription. I had a friend over last night that said the Apple TV showing iTunes content looks a lot better than plugging your iPod into the TV, remember the iPod can only connect through S-video, Apple TV can do Component or HDMI. The Apple TV has better chips inside too. Sure content isn't HD yet, or even DVD quality, but it is only a matter of time until everything on iTunes is HD. It took Apple 1 year to double resolution from 320x240 to 640x480, next double is 1280x720, tada that is HD 720p, and the next video anniversary on iTunes is in September.

Also, I went into the 5th Ave. store in Manhattan to look at the Apple TV, you can't walk right up to the TV and look at the picture, remember you are normally going to be sitting 8-12 feet away from the screen, you brain fills in and compensates for a lot of detail. Also, lighting is totally different.

And you absolutely can get user created content on this, and a lot of it is in HD. They are called podcasts, anyone can do this, I am sure you have heard of it. Anyone can film stuff and put up an RSS feed, and once you subscribe to these in iTunes, you know what it feels like, a brand new delivery system, and iTunes uses the same tech for their Season Passes to TV Shows. I think iTunes is much more advanced on TV Show delivery, Movies are at least a year newer and they have no rental scheme.

Also, the Apple TV works connected to the TV, wireless to iTunes on any computer. It sync content you tell it to, which means its on the Apple TV as soon as it shows up in iTunes, but you could also wirelessly stream content from other computers the Apple TV is not synched to. It's just like an iPod with synching, except it does so wirelessly.

One more thing, the speed of the current downloads on iTunes depend most on your internet connection, but I am seeing 10-15 minutes for a Movie, 5-10 for a TV Show, and I have a 7 Mbps connection now (free upgrade from the cable company).

So just in case it wasn't obvious, if you put all your videos into a dedicated RSS feed and subscribed to it in iTunes, you have distribution for your own TV Show to any TV Screen that has an Apple TV. I would MUCH rather watch your interviews on my TV screen than through iKlipz or YouTube, and if I want to, I can watch your show on my video iPod or on my computer. Think bigger Dave.

Me, I can't say if there's been a relative change in iTunes' download speeds. I've only been buying video content for a month or two now. I have noticed that my download speeds from the store vary greatly-- I don't know if it's load issues on their end or a connection problem on mine. It helps, though, that you can start to watch a video before it's finished downloading.

David, I think murdocdv has a great idea. You should upload your videos to iTunes in addition to iKlipz. I would be much more likely to watch them if I can subscribe to your feed and automatically download them.

Also, having seen an AppleTV playing on a friend's 61" TV (playing files bought on iTunes), and a crummy display at the Apple TV store, I'm now convinced that the Apple Store displays are either uniformly misconfigured, or not playing well with the Sony displays.

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

URL:
Remember me? YesNo

Comments: