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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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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. If I were buying it simply based on its stated features, it's so useless I'd have a hard time justifying the $300 price tag.
Latewire
Does anyone have pictures of this "horrible" video playing on a TV so people can actually make a judgment. When I played with one, the videos from the iTunes store exceeded my expectations (I was not blown away, but it was completely watchable). I assumed it would be like watching analog broadcast television on an old set, or running my LCD monitor in 800x600, but instead it looked like standard-definition (i.e. digital) broadcast. Obviously, iTunes needs to start selling higher quality content, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
If Apple had brought higher-quality videos to market first, there'd be complaints that they didn't have any device capable of pumping it to an HDTV. Since they released the device first, we get to hear about how they're not providing the content.
Moreover, this man's not really an authority on anything. He seems to be under the impression that big, loud, high power consumption equates to "capable of playing HD content better," when this of course is bullshit. He worries that the small, silent machine and its high efficiency will somehow make it incapable of playing HD--but he didn't apparently bother downloading any of the dozens of *HD* trailers available right from Apple's flipping website to test that bogus hypothesis.
Its just annoying to see when theres problems with a company product that isnt MS everyone jumps on the "its 1.0, it has bugs dont be harsh" yet they turn around and smack anything MS does right into the ground cause M$ SUX LOLZ.
Maybe think next time and judge everything accordingly. Theres no doubt that vista is drm riddled right now but stop kissing other corporate ass just because its sleek and shiny.
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.
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.
They do admit that, look under "Additional Video Requirements" on the iTunes Download Page.
It specifically states, '1 GHz G4 Processor or Better'.
I, for one, welcome our new karma-whore sig writing overlords
It'll play. You just need the right tool for the job.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
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.
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.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Actuallly I do, but it was the only statement I could think of that was more sanctimonious than an Apple Fanboy.
In all seriousness, people need to look at the best tool for the job and not be so tied up in brands.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
For the several years I've been using an el gato http://www.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/(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
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.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
* 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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
The "fair thing" to me would be to have a standard base "content price" since you're licensing the same show and IP regardless which resolution you watch it at, and then add a bandwidth surcharge based on the resolution and thus file size you download. Coming back later and downloading a different resolution of the same show should then only cost you the bandwidth surcharge of that resolution. Kind of like allofmp3 was doing it, except with an actual "artist remuneration" base cost built-in. I think this would be the fair thing to do because the industry has always harped on how consumers are just licensing content, not actually purchasing an "ownable" product. Therefore consumers should NEVER have to re-license the same content again and again just to have it available in a different format.
Although DRM is annoying in principle, in practice I don't much care about DRM on video unless it gets in my way. I might listen to the same song repeatedly for years, on multiple devices. There is not much on video that I want to watch more than once, and almost nothing that I'd want to watch more than 2 or 3 times. The only real issue is convenience and quality. I am annoyed that I have to buy a box to watch an iTunes video on my TV, when I have a perfectly good DVD burner on my computer. At least with a standard definition TiVo, it is possible to burn videos to DVD. And the XBox 360 videos aren't portable, but the box does a bit more than enable me to do something that I would have been able to do anyway if not for DRM, and the videos are HD.
So if Apple wants to sell me one of these gadgets, I'm going to want something more than SD.
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 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 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.