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AppleTV Hits the Streets
Stories are starting to pop up all over the web about the AppleTV, which evidently means that Apple has set loose the hounds of marketing and the units are (or will be tomorrow) available in Apple stores. Still no word on whether or not it plays DivX files. That will be the key to me purchasing one.
I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't have some basic tivo functionality. You can't control a cable or satellite box, you can't tune in over-the-air broadcasts, analog or digital. All you can watch is iTunes content, most of which you have to *pay* for.
I would have snapped up an "HD iTivo" in a second but that's not what it is.
"Still no word on whether or not it plays DivX files."
With an Apple product, "no word" definitely means it doesn't play them.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
This whole article is an embarrassment to SlashDot. The OP starts off by "wondering" if Apple TV will support DivX when the information on supported formats has been posted on the Apple TV web site for months.
Most of the responders seem to know nothing about the product. Asking embarrassingly stupid questions like "does it have a keyboard?", "When are they going to have non-Disney movies?" and telling us that you can only play DRM'ed video on it???
There is hardly a question posed here that would not be answered by a ten second trip to the Apple TV website and anyone following the product even the slightest bit would know the answer to them. Most of the "opinions" on the product here are ill-informed nonsense at best. On top of that, there is a lot of bitter, mean-spirited, childish banter that one would expect on kids sites like Digg or Gizmodo, not SlashDot. I am truly embarrassed to see this kind of junk here.
For those who want to know:
- doesn't support DivX
- a keyboard would make it a computer, not a set-top streamer
- non-Disney movies already available (have been for a while)
- *does* play non DRM'ed music and video (just like iPod)
I am not going to bother trying to refute every point made here or talk up the device, but for a cool techie site populated by intelligent IT people who are supposed to be in the know on stuff like this... this article and most of the related comments are a joke.
With an Apple product, "no word" definitely means it doesn't play them.
Well, but there's not "no word". There's specific word that it doesn't play them direct from Apple itself. It syncs with iTunes; that's what it does. It supports h.264 and QuickTime, which is what iTunes supports. That's what it plays.
Maybe eventually somebody will figure out how to hack it to play divx, but out of the box, it definitely doesn't. A simple look at the AppleTV product page would tell you that. The submitter apparently doesn't know how to read.
You've just changed the way you watch digital media.
Yeah, I can no longer watch it, because most of it is encoded with xvid, divx and vcd.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Compare the cost of your cable bill + netflix account + tivo service to that of just buying episodes of the shows and movies you watch. Maybe it doesn't work out well for you, but there are some people who would do very well with something like this.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Apple already builds an Apple TV for standard def TV users - it's called the iPod video. Buy one - they're the same price as this rig, albeit with less storage at the same price point, but you get portability.
--
The Apple TV - It's the true video iPod everyone tittered about all through 2005.
Instead of a cable or dock, it uses 802.11g/n.
Instead of headphones, you attach your TV/Home Theatre.
Apple limited the device to widescreen because they understand the market for the device a whole lot better than you do. People with big glass 4:3 TVs are getting rid of them. People who already have 16:9 or high-def sets will have the scratch to pop for one of these devices. They're the "wavefront" consumers who embraced the iPod first, and Apple hopes they'll embrace this iPod for the living room.
I think the reason why it doesn't support Divx is obvious. Apple wants to try and kill Divx as a de facto standard, if they possibly can. They would much rather have people using H.264 inside .mp4 container files, than Divx video inside .avi or .divx containers.
.divx or .avi into an .mp4 file without decompressing and recompressing it, thus avoiding loss. I'm not aware of any software tools that do this, though, and I might be misunderstanding ways in which Divx diverges from the standards.
.mp4 win this one, I'm not sure that they're going to; the installed base of divx-playing equipment may just be too big, and they may be forced to release an update to add support for it later.
.divx or Divx-containing .avis, which are just as much of a closed, single-vendor, proprietary format as MS Word's .doc is, and everyone loves to just shit all over that. The .mp4 container format is the video equivalent of ODF, and although I'm not going to buy one, I hope that the Apple TV is popular enough to get the script kiddies and release groups that push TV shows and movies out on bittorrent using it (because, lets face it, the main driver of Divx is "unauthorized" content, to put it politely).
It's my understanding though that at least in recent versions, Divx is essentially ISO-compliant MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP video, albeit in a nonstandard container. So it seems like it ought to be possible to 'recontainerize' a Divx
Although I would really like to see Apple and
I find it odd that so many Slashdotters seem in love with
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
... for half the cost you get a crazy additional amount of functionality.
Let's see. For "half the cost", I can buy a used device, take the time to modify it myself, and come up with a box that doesn't include a remote, support, or warranty; doesn't sync with or stream from iTunes; doesn't sync my photo library; doesn't have wireless; is about five hundred times larger; has 1/5th the capacity; and doesn't actually support playing back HD video .
Awesome.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
If you transcode the audio to AAC, you can mux it with H.264 video into an MPEG-4/QuickTime container. If you do that, though, you won't be able to pass it through to your receiver over S/PDIF.
I only transcode audio for mono & stereo sources. For multichannel audio, I leave it in AC3 and mux it with H.264 video into a Matroska container.
Creating an .mp4 file with H.264 & AAC looks something like this:
#!/bin/shd irect_pred=auto -oac copy -o /dev/null "${1}" && \d irect_pred=auto -oac copy -of rawvideo -o "${2}.264" "${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf harddup -ovc copy -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4 -of rawaudio -o "${2}.aac" "${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1400:pass=1:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1400:pass=2:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:
nice -n 18 MP4Box "${2}.mp4" -fps 23.976 -add "${2}.264" -add "${2}.aac" && \
rm "${2}.264" "${2}.aac"
Creating an .mkv file with H.264 & AC3 looks something like this:
#!/bin/shd irect_pred=auto -oac copy -o /dev/null "${1}" && \d irect_pred=auto -oac copy -of rawvideo -o "${2}.264" "${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf harddup -ovc copy -oac copy -of rawaudio -o "${2}.ac3" "${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1400:pass=1:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:
nice -n 18 mencoder -vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1400:pass=2:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:
nice -n 18 MP4Box "${2}.mp4" -fps 23.976 -add "${2}.264" && \
nice -n 18 mkvmerge -o "${2}.mkv" "${2}.mp4" "${2}.ac3" && \
rm "${2}.264" "${2}.ac3" "${2}.mp4"
Both assume that the input is NTSC video that can be inverse-telecined to produce film-rate progressive-scan video. ${1} is the source file, ${2} is the destination file (without extension), and ${3} is a "crop=w:h:x:y" parameter to get rid of any black bars around the video. On a Gentoo box, you'll want to emerge mplayer gpac mkvtoolnix to get the necessary software.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.