Apple TV "Barely Watchable"

lpangelrob writes "Peter Svensson of the Associated Press reviews the Apple TV, and comes away less than impressed.While the Apple TV gets solid marks for "a very iPod-like interface, commendably clear and easy to use", the Apple TV experience falls apart on an HD television. The reviewer notes that "videos from Apple's online iTunes store look horrible on an HDTV set. The movies and TV shows have the same nominal resolution as DVDs, but look much blurrier, approaching the look of standard-definition broadcast TV.'"

Re:My spin

[elrous0]

Hey buddy, I was a kid during the Hanna-Barbera cartoon era. I *KNOW* unwatchable television! Compared to watching that crap over a poor antenna signal, this is a golden age.

Re:My spin

[cei]

So you're saying AppleTV uses the same background picture during all chase scenes? That IS unwatchable!

Re:What did people expect?

[Yvan256]

They cram 45 minutes of BSG into a 450MB-500MB download. A BSG DVD has what... 3 to 4 episodes on it? You could fit the entirety of Season 1 of BSG from the iTMS onto two DVDs, when the full set of Season one comes with 5 DVDs.

iTunes Store content = H.264, DVDs = MPEG-2. Please get out and give back your nerd card at the door.

I see your problem

[Griim]

Apple^H^H^H^H^H TV Barely Watchable.

Fixed that for you.

Re:My spin

[PFI_Optix]

So basically Apple TV is retro?

Retro = stylish and cool

Perfect fit for Apple :)

(disclaimer: due to a handful of oversensitive Mac zealots, I feel the need to point out that that WAS A JOKE.)

Re:Technically simple, but usability could be comp

[D H NG]

Using wavelets to encode the data you can create a multi-resolutional streaming format. Meaning, you set the level of detail, and it strips off the unused data in real tim

Looks like your comment is using the wavelets encoding.

Re:Technically simple, but usability could be comp

[Sparr0]

Successfully, I might add. We stripped off two bytes and got a slightly lower quality version of the original with the complete meaning intact.