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.'"

It's Been Said Already

[slughead]

I recently purchased an Apple TV for my parents who have a 46" 1080p LCD TV.

I'd have to say that the associated press conclusion is correct about iTunes video content--barely watchable. They said the picture was "fuzzy", but I think they were really referring to the annoying artifacts present in low quality mpeg streams.

That is not to say that the AppleTV is crap, however. When playing high def content (that you rip yourself from DVD or from HDTV), it's not half bad. The thing can output at 720p at 4000kbit/s (maybe with a software upgrade (VLC)), iTunes just doesn't sell that kind of content.

Still though, with these kind of resolutions on these ginormous TVs, you're going to see artifacts even on some overly-shrunk DVD movies.

I bought the AppleTV so I could jerry rig it into something useful [appletvhacks.net]. If I were buying it simply based on its stated features, it's so useless I'd have a hard time justifying the $300 price tag.

Glitching and poor resolution

[goombah99]

This is not an apple TV problem per se, it's an ITMS problem. I don't have an ATV but I do buy videos. Indeed there are two problems I have with all the TV shows I have bought there.

1) Though it varies, the patchy compression artifacts on my computer is wretched. For the same size AVI file compressed off of a cable card the quality of the latter is much higher.

2) my 800Mhz imac can no longer play the itms videos without glitching. I've tried using quicktime insted of itunes but same result. I think this started when the doubled the number of pixels (but as noted above they did not actually improve the resolution).

The glitching is obviously due to either the codec or the DRM because I don't get this with the same size AVI file.

SUre my computer is 5 years old. But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

XBox 360

[nam37]

Not to turn this into a MSFT vs Apple thread. But I find that the XBox 360's media capabilities to be great. Good HD, network aware for music, pics, and movies. Online "rentals" and purchase. All-in-all a very complete and well done product.

I get the same thing on DVD's

[greg_barton]

I have a 42 inch 1080p LCD, and the image quality is "bad" just watching regular DVD's. Granted the iTunes content is a tad worse, but it's in the same ballpark. The only stuff that looks really good is broadcast high def or a blue ray disk.

Re:Okay, modders

[ZachPruckowski]

The issue with video quality that they have is that Apple only sells videos in 640x480. There's no mod needed to fix this, all you need to do is get your videos from elsewhere. If you get your 720p videos from the interwebs or from your cable/satellite/OTA or wherever, it'll look just fine on the AppleTV (as long as it's not DRM'd). The issue isn't with the hardware or the software, it's with the videos Apple sells.

Re:Glitching and poor resolution

[TMonks]

But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?

They do admit that, look under "Additional Video Requirements" on the iTunes Download Page [apple.com].
It specifically states, '1 GHz G4 Processor or Better'.

Re:XBox 360

[Yvan256]

But you do have to take these facts into account:
- you need an Xbox Live! Gold account, which adds a monthly fee (hey, you gotta be a paying member to be able to purchase/rent stuff, another Microsoft innovation)
- the Xbox 360 is HUGE, even more so with its huge power supply brick
- the Xbox 360 is extremely more noisy than an AppleTV, DVD player, set-top digital decoder box and HDTV, together.
- network aware only for Windows computers. Movies have to be in WMV.
- clumsy interface

The only thing the whole Xbox360+Windows PC setup has over AppleTV+iTunes is the movie rental. But even so I'm not buying a Windows PC and paying a monthly fee to do that. I'll stick to renting DVDs, thank you.

Re:Glitching and poor resolution

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

SUre my computer is 5 years old. But could they not at least admit they don't play on 800Mhz computers?

It'll play. You just need the right tool for the job. [mplayerhq.hu]

Re:What did people expect?

[CastrTroy]

Changes in the compression format can only go so far. MPEG-2 has "pretty good" compression. H.264 has better compression, but it's not a magical codec that allows you to compress stuff down to nothing without losing any quality. 45 Minutes in 500 MB won't give you DVD quality, no matter which codec you use. Even 45 Minutes of 128 kb mp3/aac will take up about 45 MB, you can't expect to fit the video part of that feed into the remaining 450 MB while still maintaining DVD quality.

Re:The author is correct - it looks horrible.

[Yvan256]

From what I've read, it seems the Apple stores are using old iTunes Store content (for unknown reason), which is as you say in the old resolution of 320x240. The Apple TV itself is not to blame here. Blame old low-resolution content and Apple's marketing team. How that mistake got through the door is simply amazing.

"Hey, let's use old iPod-sized video content to promote our new HDTV set-top box on huge LCD HDTVs in all our stores!" doesn't sound like a smart idea to me. Someone messed up, big time.

Re:Okay, modders

[Mr. Underbridge]

The issue with video quality that they have is that Apple only sells videos in 640x480

Beyond that, it's heavily compressed 640x480, correct?

my content looks great

[keytohwy]

I have an AppleTV. I also have a hi-def video camera and a decent digital SLR. Content from those devices looks fantastic. As for content from the iTMS, yes it is lower quality. Apple has quadrupled the pixels of it's offering from the first introduction, and perhaps we'll see another bump in teh future. Bt that puts an enormous strain on the networks moving that data, and takes longer for customers to get the content. When talking about the AppleTV, I always circle back to the less-obvious; How does YOUR content look? keytohwy

Re:Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Would HAVE thought"

Think about the meaning of the words you use when you string them into sentences...

Peter Svensson needs some pointers on video

[osmosium]

Peter Svensson needs a basic education in video standards. Its so obvious, hes a journalist, and not somebody, lets say, who understands video systems well enough to offer more than a passing laymans take on what hes reviewing. He steps clear past his bounds of competency saying that the quality is so poor is approches the standard definition broadcasts.... Wow. I hope nobody simply drank that kool-aid... Why? DVD's have no better resolution than standard broadcast. DVD's were invented because they were the first consumer recording technology that effectively preserved the resolution of the NTSC signal its made from. DVD's have a resolution of 480 lines. NTSC has 525 lines with 484 lines or so actually used for the picture you see. And after MPEG-2 gets done with that analog signal, there is LESS information. You think high-speed scenes benefit from 480P standard? Well, they do, but Ive lost of my count seeing artifacts in fast-wipe or quick-action scenes due to the MPEG-2 compression, 480I, 480P or High-Def. ie - The standard-def broadcast signal, when received with a strong enough signal, should be preferable, anyday, to its digital SD 480I (which most people still watch) MPEG-2 counterpart. Richard

No modding necissarry.

[pavon]

The problem isn't the device, but the low quality of the videos purchased on iTMS. If you were to go through the hassle of ripping from DVD, you wouldn't have this problem. Which really gets down to the issue of why this device is so underwelming - it desperately needs more/better sources of content. There are many ways they could achieve this:

* Add a TV tuner and make it a PVR.
* Improve the format options for people with existing collections.
* Vastly extend amount of content at the iTunes store, increase compression quality
* Extend the iTunes video store to include pay-per-view.
* Allow purchases derictly from the device.

While a lot of people have been calling for the first, I think Apple is smart by staying out of that game. First off, the vast majority of people that want PVR's get them from their cable companies, and everyone else buys a Tivo, which is a very well polished product. Secondly, CableCard support has been a mess, making it a pain for third party PVR's, and limiting the service that they can provide to their customers. Between these two issues I really don't see what Apple could do to make themselves stand-out the way they have in other markets where the competition couldn't provide a good interface to save themselves. Lastly, cable television as we know it is on it's way out. It is going to take a while, but the future is internet distribution, and now is the time for them to get on that bandwagon if they want to be a major player. So jumping into an overcrowded market that will quickly be entering into decline isn't a very good idea.

The fact that you have buy songs on a computer is a major pain, and something they could have fixed today, but in the end whether you allow purchases to be made from the couch or not, you will still need to link it to a computer that has more hard-drive space than the Apple TV. This is one of the reasons that I think that set-top boxes work better for pay-per-view / rental than for purchased media, but apparently that is not something that Apple wants to get into. Whatever they decide, Apple really needs to get the ball with their online video distribution, because their current offering are pathetic.

Re:Television Becomes Computing

[teh kurisu]

I never claimed that it required a widescreen TV. Scart cables carry information about the aspect ratio of the signal, and most fullscreen TVs in Europe will automatically compensate.

Connecting to a standard-def TV using component cables obviously requires a standard-def TV with component inputs. Don't know about America, but in Europe these are very thin on the ground. You might be able to connect it via a component-to-Scart cable, but this is a non-standard use of Scart and not guaranteed to be supported by your television (although you could buy a converter [reghardware.co.uk]).

Re:I agree...sort of.

[rindeee]

Yes indeed. Why just yesterday I was trying hard to give them cavities in lieu of killing them (handing out Easter candies that we had been sent while out on a run).

Re:Okay, modders

[prockcore]

If you get your 720p videos from the interwebs or from your cable/satellite/OTA or wherever, it'll look just fine on the AppleTV

AppleTV can only do 720p at 24fps. That's fine for movies, but not for anything fast moving, like sports.

some learning curve involved ...

[constantnormal]

I have a Hitachi 42" plasma HDTV, supporting 1080i and 720p formats, downscaled to the 1000x1000 physical pixel layout of the device. Yeah, it's not your typical uber-video 1080p whiz-bang HDTV, but it still blows me away.

For the several years I've been using an el gato http://www.elgato.com/ [elgato.com]eyeTV HTDV gizmo to record over-the-air HD content to disk, and then (lacking any means of directly driving the Hitachi HDTV from the server) burning the programs to DVD for playback on the better screen via the set-top DVD player. Packing HD content onto a standard DVD is a learning experience in itself, as it's all to easy to put more bandwidth into the DVD than the player will handle, with subsequent artifacts and other nonsense.

So when the AppleTV was announced, I leaped at it, and have been getting accustomed to the device over the past few weeks. My goal has been (and is) to use the server in the next room as a media server, streaming content to the Apple TV for playback on the Hitachi plasma HDTV. In this, my intent has been to put DVDs and recorded broadcast content on the server, taking advantage of the rapid decline in cost of hard drives.

I've had most success using Handbrake to rip DVDs to bits-on-a-disk in MP4 form, then using VisualHub to fine-tune the conversion to AppleTV format, transcoding to H.264 and 1280x720, 24 fps for DVDs. For broadcast content, I go directly from eyeTV to an AppleTV-compatible format (960x540, 29.97 fps, single-pass H.264). The AppleTV-formatted content is then added to iTunes and streamed to the AppleTV via 802.11n wifi. I find that streaming gives me better results than syncing, especially if the content has longer playback times. In all cases, I maintain the max playback bandwidth at close to 5 Mbps, the published limits of the AppleTV.

The reason I go for the 960x540 format for broadcast content is that it's gonna end up that way anyhow, due to the content provider's (that would be the studio, not Apple) inclusion of the ICT http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_c pr_redefined/ [broadcastengineering.com](Image Constraint Tag) in the video stream, so that higher-resolution video thusly tagged gets knocked back to 960x540. If you just let QuickTime do the conversion via their AppleTV menu choice in QuickTime Pro, you also get the bandwidth throttled back to 4 Mbps.

The end result is that the viewing experience is very close to set-top DVD playback, but less than over-the-air HDTV. All in all, a "good enough" experience, especially for only $320 (including the HDMI-to-HDMI cabling).

In my initial testing of the device, I predicted that there would be a chasm between two groups of users -- those who love the AppleTV, and see it as a significant advance in bringing computer-controlled TVs into the living room, vs those who see it as an abject failure. The difference between these two camps is largely one born out of expectations. The people who hate it wanted effortless 1080p quality video, a built-in DVD player and HD receiver, and were shocked to discover that it actually was a little less than Steve Jobs pitched it to be, instead of a lot more. Maybe a second- or third-generation model will come closer to their dreams, but if so, it will be because the studios have loosened up in what they will permit such a device to do, and because the internet providers have boosted the available bandwidth to permit downloading of multi-gigabyte files in a reasonable time (hint: an hour of HD MPEG2 video takes around 5 GB to store on the hard drive).

Today's limitations on what can be done with connecting the internet to HDTV are constrained mostly by the available bandwidth and the studios' restrictions on how much fidelity they allow in downloaded content. When the Xbox HD content-via-the-web becomes available, I expect that it will be similarly hobbled.

So long as you don't have over-the-top expectations, y

The guy's a crock

[sl3xd]

Considering I've got almost everything mentioned in the article. (I don't have Blu-ray, and I chose HD DVD because it has less restrictive DRM-- that and I see Sony as the Microsoft of consumer electronics)

I think I'm able to make a decent comparison:

HD DVD & Blu-ray use the same codecs (in many cases, there was only one encode, which was then copied to both discs), and bitrates well above human perception-- they look and sound identical.

Xbox Live Marketplace is only 720p, vs the 1080p of HD DVD & Blu-ray. (The difference between 720p and 1080p do exist, but you've got to sit pretty close to the screen to see them.) Movies are VC-1 encoded, and are about 6-8 GB in size, and are 'rentals.' You have to watch it within 14 days of 'renting' the movie, and you can only watch it for 24 hours after the first time you play it. The cost is somewhat hidden, as it is rented in terms of 'microsoft points', which you have to buy first. Why there's an additional level of indirection for xbox live purchases, I don't know.

DVD is the standard most are familiar with. It's better than broadcast TV.

And Apple TV is anywhere from TV Broadcast quality (obviously in cases where the source was broadcast quality), up to DVD quality. Movies are about 1.5-2 GB in size. And you buy the movie outright, and can watch it whenever you want, forever.

So, to nobody's suprise, the Apple TV doesn't to full HD content -- and frankly, I'm fine with that. Most people forget that full HD would mean much larger downloads, and more hard disc space.

Part of the 'joy' of the iTunes store is that you're able to download something in less time than it takes to go to the store and buy it. And at the moment, it takes a lot less time to drive to the store and buy a HD DVD than it does to download on consumer broadband.

So in a few years, when there's higher speeds for consumer broadband, I can see full HD downloads, and an upgraded Apple TV. Apple is probably trying to build a new market, not compete in a pre-existing one.

The Xbox suffers because it can take *forever* to download movies, because you can't keep the movies ('rental' only), and because Xbox Live Marketplace movies can't be transferred to a PC for storage. Apple TV works with both Mac and Windows (and is probably hackable for Linux use), where the 360 is strictly Windows-only. If you only use Windows, it's no big deal, but if you use something else, you're SOL.

Re:Not on my TV

[ITman75]

If any one really read the requirements, it says for use with a WIDE SCREEN TV. To me that doesn't mean it needs to be HD. I bought the Apple TV. I have it hooked up to my 42" Samsung Plasma HD TV and I think it looks great. I knew not to expect 1080i on the video's. Can't complain about Apple TV.

It's not the "same resolution"

[Swift2001]

Standard def for an NTSC encoded DVD is 720 x 480, which is a lot more than what Apple's selling now. Also the bitrate is 4000 bps encoding, which is a LOT more than the iTunes store sells. I went into an Apple store and noticed the problem immediately. Ironically, some of the podcasts show up very nicely. And go, modders! I want BitTorrent and Internet access on it.

Higher frame rates ARE better

[ABasketOfPups]

You're a little off, here. People can most certainly see the difference between 24 frames per second and, say, a 60 frame per second film (i.e., something actually filmed at 60 FPS). (Showscan: How it works [barbeefilm.com] talks about an actual application of 60 FPS filming.) You really should do a little more research than whatever site said "18 fps is all you need!" because that's really, really wrong. Start with http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_s ee.htm [100fps.com] but for real fun, go get AVISynth, VirtualDub, and the MVTools plugin and convert a 24 FPS film to 48 FPS. There'll be some frames that break apart because any such conversion can't be perfect, but even going to 48 FPS for, say, the water running part of "100 Mile Dash" in "The Incredibles" looks much, much smoother, like you're right there watching it... er, if you were a cartoon character anyhow. :) (The jungle scenes become almost abstract as MVTools tries to figure out the interstitial frames, but the parts not in the jungle look gorgeous). That the regular devices out there update the DISPLAY at 60 hz, that's nothing to do with how many frames of different video are being displayed. 60 Hz display of 24 or 30 FPS film or video, is just flashing the image in front of you twice as fast. Even theaters actually show 24 FPS films at 48 or 72 hz to reduce flicker, but the frame rate is still 24.

Re:Okay, modders

[Vitriol+Angst]

To get even more nerdy...
h.264 is just the speck or the packaging around the compression. There is some ability to create the optimal compression codec within the codec without a new codec. Meaning "QuickTime" is just a wrapper application. Where a ".mov" file can be from Sorenson, divx, etc. Now to play those "non-standard" third-party compressed files - you need to get their codec. Whereas with h.264, that "codec within the codec" can be in the compressed file.

So the quaility of h.264 really relies on the company creating sofware to compress it. The Apple AAC variant stunk for a while -- which is why it didn't stack up well against some Windows Media and DivX (but they all stole from MPEG 4 originally anyway). And you even have Flash video now, which was using Sorenson, but is now using On2 compression algorithms in their latest version. On2 also makes compressors for h.264 which so far have the best quality. By opening up the h.264 spec -- well, you let others improve it.

So, to agree; it totally matters what "h.264" compressor you are using. H.264 stinks or doesn't based on the bandwidth and the algorithms used.

As the infrastructure grows -- Apple will be starting with better quality video and outputting higher resolution files. The more money in this market -- the more really good companies will jump on board. Most of the best codec providers seem to come from Germany and Israel, traditionally.

Re:Okay, modders

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not informative, unless one wants to be informed that Vitriol+Angst doesn't know what he or she is writing about, and writes badly as well.

AVC ("Advanced Video Codec") is a lossy compression scheme for digital video. It is known by its ITU-T standard name H.264 AVC, and also by the ISO/IEC name MPEG-4 Part 10, among several others.

AAC is "Advanced Audio Coding", a lossy compression scheme for digital audio. It is also known as MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3, among names.

Each compression system makes assumptions about the input and the viewer or listener, and throws away information that would not be noticed by the latter. This is called psychovisual or psychoacoustical model compression, respectively.

The bitstreams produced by the compressors are what can be put into a variety of containers -- file formats or streaming formats -- interleaved with other bitstreams (encoded text, audio and video, animated objects, and so forth). A container with timeline support -- like the QuickTime format or MPEG-4 transport streams (MPEG-4 Part 14) -- makes it easier for a multimedia player to invoke a variety of decoding algorithms on the different objects in the container, and display the results at the appropriate time.

H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10, which is just one of many object types that can be carried in an MPEG-4 Part 14 container (colloquially called an .mp4 file). It is not "a codec within a codec", it is not an "Apple AAC variant" (AAC is MPEG-4 Part 3). AAC is not a video codec, and "why it didn't stack up well against [...] DivX" is that the latter is a video codec and not an audio codec.

To get even more nerdy...

Nerds are supposed to be accurate about technical things, aren't they?