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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.'"
Who would of thought a compressed movie format would look bad on a high definition tv?
TheLedger title: Apple Appalls Where Xbox ExcelsSo he puts the AppleTV down its "video quality"...But then say it's got a great-looking interface on a high-definition TV...And THEN complains about the real problem, which is the iTunes Store content itself, not the AppleTV. The movies and TV shows will look even worst on your computer LCD display, which are even better than a crappy HDTV that will most probably rescale your image before displaying it. But no, he has to make it sound like it's a problem with the AppleTV.What does he mean by "doesn't actually seem that well suited to it"? The hard drive is more than enough for H.264 content (requires less space than regular MPEG-4), low power consumption means nothing with dedicated solutions (if the MPEG-4 and H.264 decoding is done by the GPU, you don't need a Quad-Core 3GHz processor).
And what the hell does SD content looking bad has to do with HD content? That's like saying my 1280x1024 LCD will probably look shitty with a 1280x1024 wallpaper because it looks shitty when it has a 320x256 wallpaper on it. No correlation at all, this guy is an idiot.
So, the guy knows the real problem (varying video quality from the iTunes Store, but that's the content providers fault, not Apple) but still puts down the AppleTV for fake flaws.
In short, I call Microsoft shill on this guy.
While they only sell standard def, they give away free high def movie trailers.
So the real test would be downloading one of the HD movie trailers from iTunes and trying it on the AppleTV product.
If they work well, then chances are if/when Apple movies to sell full movies in HD, the device will handle it well and be more "future proof" than suggested here. If on the other hand it chugs along bandwidth problems, we'll know for sure that its a SD-only device.
Heavily compressed doesn't mean poor quality though. Look at the H264 codec. Very clean and sharp looking, but takes up less space.
iTunes videos are h.264. You've drunk the kool-aid Apple's been pouring for you - h.264 by itself is not some picture quality panacea. At a certain point, data loss is data loss. And h.264 is lossy compression just like divx or wmv or any other codec. (All of these are based around mpeg4, btw - h.264 is just a somewhat more advanced version, but it is still mpeg4.)
h.264 compression is always a series of compromises, just like any other compression. The end result may be a slightly smaller file with the same quality or a slightly better file at the same file size vs. other codecs, but just because you encode something with h.264 doesn't mean it's going to be crystal clear and artifact-free. h.264 videos can easily look just as bad as any other videos. Apple obviously had not originally planned on their iTunes videos being watched on large screens, so they never took the care to encode for this type of viewing.