Apple TV "Barely Watchable" 424
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.'"
Okay, modders (Score:5, Interesting)
My spin (Score:4, Interesting)
So, couldn't you alternately say that Apple TV is as good as network TV?
(I know, I know, the "unwatchability" is due to picture quality, not content. Still, you have to compare the total experience, not each aspect individually.)
Re:My spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Growing up, my best friend's stepfather used to say that he used to be into high end stereo equipment, but gave it up and settled for a relatively crappy one. As he put it, "I found I was listening to the noise instead of the music".
Re:My spin (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Television Becomes Computing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My spin (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Glitching and poor resolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course I suppose that might also be some limit imposed on them by the studios. Just like music they cap the resolution to make transcoding an ugly prospect. After all in theory H264 ought to be about the best quality codec you can get.
Oops! (Score:2, Interesting)
I need read no farther - the reviewer is ignorant. Cassettes are, when played on quality equipment, better sounding than any lossily compressed digital file and in fact approach CD's clarity. I have CDs I sampled from cassettes that I've played on musicians' stage equipment and the musicians are amazed that it's sampled from cassette.
I understand his ignorance; like most, he never heard a factory-recorded cassette with Dolby-C played on a $1,000 cassette deck. But if he's going to make a value statement about a piece of gear he doesn't even know he's ignorant about, I need not read his review about a piece of gear that has just hit the market.
Now, the
In short, as is often seen at slashdot, I have to repeat "nothing to see here." I'll wait for a review from a less clueless reviewer; AP isn't very good at anythiong tech.
I'll also wait quite a while for an HDTV, as my 215 pound, 3 year old trinitron will likely last me quite a while more, although I expect I'll be buying a converter box sometime in the next couple of years.
-mcgrew (sm62704)
Re:Okay, modders (Score:4, Interesting)
H.264 rocks, TV studios suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting the picture yet? Yuk yuk. The bottom line is that you get radically better performance out of H.264 than MPEG-2 at similar bitrates. So a ~45 minute TV episode weighing in at 400MB for a total combined audio/video bitrate of around 1250 kbps gets nearly identical quality to a 2500 kbps MPEG-2 bitstream. Of course on DVD you get goodies like the 5.1 surround audio track, so it's still a better deal, but Apple's done a lot to close the gap.
The REAL problem with iTMS video has absolutely nothing to do with bitrate. No, it's the shitty masters that the TV producers are provisioning Apple with. The people who do Monk, for instance, don't even bother supplying the 16:9 master -- instead they give Apple a crappy 4:3 version. The BSG people have more than once given Apple 480i broadcast masters instead of the HD masters or at least a 480p source, and you get deinterlace artifacting on some episodes as a result. Garbage in, garbage out.
Start an email campaign to the TV execs demanding that they give Apple the same stuff they give to the HD networks and you'll see an improvement in quality. Until then, you'll get the same old crap.
Apple maybe getting it's own due? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't knock the hardware for it. It's a nice little hardware platform, place the blame on the shoulders of an iTunes service which just doesn't have enough HD content.
It's like my wife blaming Windows Media Center for choppy video performance watching a video when it was really a flaky wireless router dropping packets.
Re:Okay, modders (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically simple, but usability could be complex (Score:5, Interesting)
What I think needs to happen, is Apple needs to find a way of letting people download video for a particular device. Unlike with audio, where most people will listen to the same track on their iPod and through their home stereo (which makes me think that a lot of people must be near-deaf, but I digress), people aren't going to do the same thing with video. They want high-def content for their HDTV, which means a different file from the quick-downloading version for their iPod.
Assuming Apple has the source material available, it should be trivial to produce HD versions of the programming that's on the iTMS. What's more difficult is how they're going to let users choose between versions, and how it'll be priced. If you download a TV episode for your iPod, will that be the same price as a HD version for your iTV? And if you get the iTV version, will you automatically get the low-res version as well (because it would be trivial to transcode down if not)? Or will there just be one price that entitles you to all resolutions (fat chance)? Those questions are more complicated than the technical ones -- Apple has more than enough expertise to produce good-looking HD material...look at their own Movie Trailer site if you want examples. Some of those clips are practically reference material for people setting up HD displays, because they're pretty close to broadcast quality.
The technical capability is all there, I just think they haven't quite worked out the business and user-training angle yet.
Re:No modding necissarry. (arr!) (Score:4, Interesting)
* Add a TV tuner and make it a PVR.
oh god no. you need to add a ATSC aand QUAM tuner to it as well as a cablecard slot and that alone will triple the price of the damn thing. if you want a tivo then buy a Tivo. if you want a internet TV device then buy this.
I have dabbled in "convergence" boxes for years and all you get is something that sucks all the way around. mythtv is great except you cant record most HD content on it. HD tivo is great but you cant take your HD content with you. Windows Media Center sucks completely as you get Draconian DRM with mediocre on a machine that can get viruses and works on it.
This produce does what it is supposed to and does it well, the content blows because honestly the US internet infrastructure is way under powered for what it needs to do.
itunes content sucked to high hell when they started out. I am not surpised that the video content stinks because itunes cant afford 20 OC48 lines into every major LATA to serve the HD content let alone the fact that every cablemodem and DSL connection is so anemic that the customer will get pissed with download times.
I think the product rocks, it plays all the mythtv content I can chuck at it automagically (thanks to a modded myth2ipod module) and does other things well, my biggest complaint is that it will not get the RSS feeds it's self but requires a pc running itunes to do it, which is major BS. the thing can handle RSS on it's own, apple chose to keep you dependant on itunes for all content.
Re:Technically simple, but usability could be comp (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Shocking titles, misleading review (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're somewhat confused about how AppleTV works. In it's basic, unhacked form, it plays the media stored in your iTunes application. That media can come from various places. For music, it could be bought from the iTunes Store, or ripped from a CD, or downloaded from a P2P network. Maybe it's a song you made yourself in Garage Band. For movies, the same applies. You could have bought it from the iTunes Store, or ripped it (using the aforementioned handbrake) from a DVD. You could have downloaded it, but then you might have to transcode it to a format AppleTV understands (which is easily possible using many applications, among them QuickTime - alternatively, you could install the codecs needed in your AppleTV). The movie could also be something you made yourself in an app like iMovie.
These are all valid uses for an AppleTV (although some of them might not be legal where you live). None of them are "getting around" Apple's method. These are all sanctioned by Apple. So iTunes is the only way to go, but the iTunes Store is not.
The issue here is not with iTunes or the AppleTV. The issue is with the format of the movies sold in the iTunes Store. The quality of these apparently sucks (although I can not vouch for that, I've never seen a movie from the iTunes Store). If that bothers you, there's an easy fix: Don't buy movies from the iTunes Store.
Re:Technically simple, but usability could be comp (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Okay, modders (Score:2, Interesting)
The AppleTV uses a GeForce 7300, running at a clockspeed that gives low power consumption.
Given that it only has a 1GHz Dothan-equivalent inside, I guess that all of the work is done on the graphics card, presumably using something similar to PureVideo, or indeed PureVideo itself.
It can decode 5mbps H.264. That equal to what? 10mbps MPEG2? Certainly nothing like the 20+ mbps that HD DVD/BluRay provide. And if you're used to that, AppleTV will look crap in comparison. As a $300 device, it's priced for the consumer. Stick it on a consumer HDTV and most people will be happy. Everybody else wait until Apple get something a bit more refined hardware wise out of the door.