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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.'"
Maybe the modders can fix it. God knows they've been fixing all the many OTHER things that are wrong with it.
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Anyone here remember what TV was like before cable and the internet? Wasn't most of that stuff barely watchable? (Notice how hosts like Donahue, popular at that time, utterly failed when there was real competition.)
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.)
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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 has long strived to merge the concept of the device and the service into one. It's what made the iPod/iTunes combo such a devastatingly effective one. Is this a case where that same mantra is biting them in the posterior? In this case the lacking of higher definition content on service (iTunes) is magnified by the product.
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.
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Yes, and that's the icing on the cake; 640x480 ought to look similar to a DVD. Same vertical resolution anyway, just less horizontal pixels. They also seem to be compressing the living crap out of them in order to make them small enough for iPod Video sales.
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.
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* 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.
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There is a technical solution to this problem.
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