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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.
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
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".
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Hey buddy, I was a kid during the Hanna-Barbera cartoon era. I *KNOW* unwatchable television! Compared to watching that crap over a poor antenna signal, this is a golden age.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
So you're saying AppleTV uses the same background picture during all chase scenes? That IS unwatchable!
This sig intentionally left justified.
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
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.
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
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.