HE-AAC (V1), AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV; Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound pass-through
If what you want is for Apple to support specifically FLAC, then say so. Do not taint your comment with inferences that Apple only supports its own proprietary standards.
Many of the standards supported by iOS devices in general, and AppleTV in particular, are indeed what is already out there on the web and supported by many other major consumer device vendors, including Television Sets and media players.
They may not be royalty-free or have an open source implementation available, but that is hardly the same as trying to get the web to conform to Apple's desires. Besides, this is a device to be used with a TV, not a web browser.
There's a lot of misinformation out there, so let me try to answer this with as many facts as I can:
1. No, only HDMI is supported.
2. It ranges from the "very easy" to the "virtually impossible" depending on what you expect them to use it for. First, it comes with a very simple remote control with only 4 navigation buttons (up, down, left, right) and one "Enter" button, organized in a circle like the old iPod scroll wheel. The remote control also has two comfortably large sound volume buttons. Second, the user interface is so darn intuitive, that it is designed to be fully navigable with just the remote control. Choosing a movie to rent and view is as simple as two or three clicks away.
But that's just it. If all they plan on doing with it is renting movies from iTunes or Netflix with their AppleTV, it's as easy as a toaster. However, it won't "play" TV. It doesn't have a TV tuner, so if they want to watch TV, they will need to interface with their TV's remote or control panel to switch from external input to the internal TV tuner. If they can manage this, then there's no problem. Your comment suggests that they won't. That said, this is the same for anybody who has a DVD player or any other external device hooked up to a TV.
And if they have a personal computer running iTunes, they can play all their music, videos, pod-casts, and photos from it using the same simple interface in the AppleTV as for renting movies--but someone has to show them how to get the stuff in their PC in the first place. Again, if they can manage this, the rest goes swimmingly.
Note, however, that a personal computer and iTunes is not necessary to access the online iTunes store.
What about DVDs? The AppleTV does not have a DVD drive in it. Nor does iTunes, which means that even if they put the DVD in their personal computer's player, it won't stream to the AppleTV. Someone will have to help your parents encode their DVDs into an iTunes-friendly format. This is easy to do with many readily available tools, but it is not built-in. However, once all videos are in, it all works easily and intuitively, so maybe it's the price to pay to set them up at first.
Alternatively, they could play DVDs on a regular DVD player, and switch inputs as normal.
3. 1000 Kbit/s line? That's 1 Mbit/s, it should be fine. There is no "download first and watch later". The AppleTV only streams its content, it does not download for later viewing.
The AppleTV is primarily designed to be an interface for streaming digital content into your TV. The digital content is expected to come from iTunes--either your iTunes client on a PC, or the online iTunes Music/Video Store. It also allows streaming from YouTube and Netflix. For these narrow uses, it is superb. And to be honest, that's pretty much what a lot of people need (I personally do not watch regular TV, only Netflix and my purchased DVDs, which I have encoded into iTunes already, so for me it is a dream.)
The rental prices range from $0.99 for TV shows to $4.99 for the latest movie releases. The selection of movies available for rent is wide and varied, and includes many new releases. For TV shows, only a few networks have joined so far, but presumably the list will grow eventually. TV shows will be available the day after they first air, completely commercial free, for $0.99 cents.
It is up to you (and your parents) to decide if this will suit your their TV watching habits. And even if they do not have any streaming needs today, consider that it may be the most accessible distribution channel for entertainment in the near future, and therefore the AppleTV may be viewed as an investment.
You may want to check out the glossy marketing material available from Apple directly: http://www.apple.com/appletv/ Also, I personally find it helpful sometimes to use the Online Store Live Chat feature and ask questions directly from a representative.
Not really. It's like Leonardo himself deciding that, rather than buy a new canvas, he will reuse one of his old paintings--perhaps that old one with the very impressive landscape that won him all those awards and praise, but which is mostly forgotten in his attic by now--and paint over it a picture of a chick he saw walk by the market yesterday, with a sensual and intriguing smile.
That's actually what is going on, at least according to Peter Jackson.
-- The MEAA is demanding that the Hobbit production company (Warners owned, 3foot7 Ltd) enter into negotiations for a Union negotiated agreement covering all performers on the film.
In other words, the union is demanding the right to manage all negotiations for all actors in the film. Since presumably not everyone hired is a union member, this either forces everyone to become a member, or to abide by the results of the union's negotiations, essentially becoming de facto members.
It's a quote from a silly scene in the movie. Some geeky guy runs around the arcade telling everybody that someone is about to reach the "kill-screen" of the game, as if it were a momentous occasion.
A "kill-screen" in a game is when the high score overflows its boundaries and corrupts the rest of memory, typically video memory, which causes the game to display in a way that is unplayable. The result is either the game crashing or the player losing a game life.
>> Plus at least it will be able to multitask, a bare minimum for a tablet to be usable.
Then I pity all those who are buying that absolutely unusable iPad by truckloads. I bet there's a landfill somewhere replete of the devices, where people have been dumping them on their very first day after realising that it really does not work sans multitasking.
Perhaps his twitter friends did not know where he was, but another article mentions that there had been already five months of negotiations between the government and his captors for release. It also mentions that he was released due to being a muslim.
In light of that, Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest possible explanation is that those more reasonable and actionable events lead to his release.
Fine, so the recurring theme of those defending Flash on mobile devices is that, sure it sucks balls and it's slow and clunky, and the stock interfaces on most Flash games do not really translate well to touch-screens, and it zaps your battery life like it were slurping juice through a fat straw; but someday, somehow, these problems will go away.
Yet here we are, today.
War is not really horrid, you know, it's just the way countries do it today actually that ends up in the killing of so many people; we should support it anyway because it's really a standard way to solve conflicts. Beef is not murder, it's just that there's no other current way to get the meat off the cow in a nice and gentle way without killing it; so right now Beef is merely accidental man slaughter, until that changes.
See? It's fun to ignore flaws in arguments and stick to your straw man.
Oh, and next year will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop for sure, because it is really superior to anything out there, just like it has been for the past ten years...
This can be easily fixed by defining the service classes by industry standard or by government regulation. What you described is a single and narrow problem that occurs in a wild-wild-west scenario, without any regulation; not an inherent flaw of service prioritizing.
Since the prioritization by its nature means that the bandwidth will be unevenly distributed, this may affect the revenue of the network provider (since a small set of entities may consume a greater percentage of the total bandwidth); and so charging a higher fee for this priority is warranted and standard in any other industry.
The "Net Neutralitites" seek to ban any sort of prioritization for hire.
Actually, that's not quite true. The analogy would be more accurate if your hypothetical Highway Company made rules that said,
1. Aall vehicles classed as Consumer Vehicle need to yield to any vehicle classed as Emergency Vehicle when the latter is on the roadway.
2. All vehicles classed as "Taxi Vehicle" will have priority on congested intersections during peak traffic hours.
And for the purpose of this new rule, the following registration procedures should be imposed:
1. Any customer can register their vehicle as class Consumer Vehicle.
2. Only special organizations designated and controlled by local governmental authorities can register vehicles as class Emergency Vehicle.
3. Any commercial organization can register their fleet as class Taxi Vehicle by paying an additional registration surcharge and priority access fee.
While the big boogieman being thrown about by "Net Neutrality" proponents is that communication networks want to charge you more or give their own services more priority, what is actually being proposed is charging more for those types of services which require a higher prioritization, such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand streaming. "Services" in this context should be understood as Network Services, in the sense of Internet and general communications protocols--not, as some seem to imply, merely individual commercial services or products.
Contrary to what many believe, this is compatible with the original intent and spirit of the Internet.
Bullshit! If he was dead the whole time, how did he defeat Professor Snape Gruber and henchman Karl Godunov at the end, before the big finale when the entire top of the building exploded?
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. From the AppleTV web page:
Audio formats supported:
If what you want is for Apple to support specifically FLAC, then say so. Do not taint your comment with inferences that Apple only supports its own proprietary standards.
Many of the standards supported by iOS devices in general, and AppleTV in particular, are indeed what is already out there on the web and supported by many other major consumer device vendors, including Television Sets and media players.
They may not be royalty-free or have an open source implementation available, but that is hardly the same as trying to get the web to conform to Apple's desires. Besides, this is a device to be used with a TV, not a web browser.
-dZ.
There's a lot of misinformation out there, so let me try to answer this with as many facts as I can:
1. No, only HDMI is supported.
2. It ranges from the "very easy" to the "virtually impossible" depending on what you expect them to use it for. First, it comes with a very simple remote control with only 4 navigation buttons (up, down, left, right) and one "Enter" button, organized in a circle like the old iPod scroll wheel. The remote control also has two comfortably large sound volume buttons. Second, the user interface is so darn intuitive, that it is designed to be fully navigable with just the remote control. Choosing a movie to rent and view is as simple as two or three clicks away.
But that's just it. If all they plan on doing with it is renting movies from iTunes or Netflix with their AppleTV, it's as easy as a toaster. However, it won't "play" TV. It doesn't have a TV tuner, so if they want to watch TV, they will need to interface with their TV's remote or control panel to switch from external input to the internal TV tuner. If they can manage this, then there's no problem. Your comment suggests that they won't. That said, this is the same for anybody who has a DVD player or any other external device hooked up to a TV.
And if they have a personal computer running iTunes, they can play all their music, videos, pod-casts, and photos from it using the same simple interface in the AppleTV as for renting movies--but someone has to show them how to get the stuff in their PC in the first place. Again, if they can manage this, the rest goes swimmingly.
Note, however, that a personal computer and iTunes is not necessary to access the online iTunes store.
What about DVDs? The AppleTV does not have a DVD drive in it. Nor does iTunes, which means that even if they put the DVD in their personal computer's player, it won't stream to the AppleTV. Someone will have to help your parents encode their DVDs into an iTunes-friendly format. This is easy to do with many readily available tools, but it is not built-in. However, once all videos are in, it all works easily and intuitively, so maybe it's the price to pay to set them up at first.
Alternatively, they could play DVDs on a regular DVD player, and switch inputs as normal.
3. 1000 Kbit/s line? That's 1 Mbit/s, it should be fine. There is no "download first and watch later". The AppleTV only streams its content, it does not download for later viewing.
The AppleTV is primarily designed to be an interface for streaming digital content into your TV. The digital content is expected to come from iTunes--either your iTunes client on a PC, or the online iTunes Music/Video Store. It also allows streaming from YouTube and Netflix. For these narrow uses, it is superb. And to be honest, that's pretty much what a lot of people need (I personally do not watch regular TV, only Netflix and my purchased DVDs, which I have encoded into iTunes already, so for me it is a dream.)
The rental prices range from $0.99 for TV shows to $4.99 for the latest movie releases. The selection of movies available for rent is wide and varied, and includes many new releases. For TV shows, only a few networks have joined so far, but presumably the list will grow eventually. TV shows will be available the day after they first air, completely commercial free, for $0.99 cents.
It is up to you (and your parents) to decide if this will suit your their TV watching habits. And even if they do not have any streaming needs today, consider that it may be the most accessible distribution channel for entertainment in the near future, and therefore the AppleTV may be viewed as an investment.
You may want to check out the glossy marketing material available from Apple directly:
http://www.apple.com/appletv/
Also, I personally find it helpful sometimes to use the Online Store Live Chat feature and ask questions directly from a representative.
-dZ.
Not really. It's like Leonardo himself deciding that, rather than buy a new canvas, he will reuse one of his old paintings--perhaps that old one with the very impressive landscape that won him all those awards and praise, but which is mostly forgotten in his attic by now--and paint over it a picture of a chick he saw walk by the market yesterday, with a sensual and intriguing smile.
-dZ.
>> We all know they just re-shot the footage on the sound stage.
That's just so 80's. Everybody knows that this kind of VFX is done with CGI.
-dZ.
Sorry, I meant to reply to that comment.
-dZ.
And is that "Israel, CN" perchance?
The comparison was of innovation between USA and China. I don't think it implied that the USA invented everything.
-dZ.
Woosh!
Not that you are incorrect, but... way to miss the point.
-dZ.
Why are cats a waste of cat food? Who'd eat it if we had no cats?
I say cats are a necessary evil, to maintain in check the otherwise overwhelming stockpiles of cat food.
-dZ.
No, that's Linux On The Desktop. Get your broken memes straight.
-dZ.
That's actually what is going on, at least according to Peter Jackson.
In other words, the union is demanding the right to manage all negotiations for all actors in the film. Since presumably not everyone hired is a union member, this either forces everyone to become a member, or to abide by the results of the union's negotiations, essentially becoming de facto members.
-dZ.
Zulu! I told you zillion times, get off my chair!!!
-J.T.
I saw what you did there, slick.
-dZ.
It's a quote from a silly scene in the movie. Some geeky guy runs around the arcade telling everybody that someone is about to reach the "kill-screen" of the game, as if it were a momentous occasion.
A "kill-screen" in a game is when the high score overflows its boundaries and corrupts the rest of memory, typically video memory, which causes the game to display in a way that is unplayable. The result is either the game crashing or the player losing a game life.
-dZ.
there's a Donkey Kong kill-screen coming up.
-dZ.
Thank you for not posting what "LARP" meant and making waste 20 seconds of my life too.
For the benefit of future visitors,
LARP = Live Action Role-Playing.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of your rant.
-dZ.
>> Plus at least it will be able to multitask, a bare minimum for a tablet to be usable.
Then I pity all those who are buying that absolutely unusable iPad by truckloads. I bet there's a landfill somewhere replete of the devices, where people have been dumping them on their very first day after realising that it really does not work sans multitasking.
-dZ.
Perhaps his twitter friends did not know where he was, but another article mentions that there had been already five months of negotiations between the government and his captors for release. It also mentions that he was released due to being a muslim.
In light of that, Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest possible explanation is that those more reasonable and actionable events lead to his release.
-dZ.
Ah, reasoning and deduction from the Twitter generation.
dZ.
Fine, so the recurring theme of those defending Flash on mobile devices is that, sure it sucks balls and it's slow and clunky, and the stock interfaces on most Flash games do not really translate well to touch-screens, and it zaps your battery life like it were slurping juice through a fat straw; but someday, somehow, these problems will go away.
Yet here we are, today.
War is not really horrid, you know, it's just the way countries do it today actually that ends up in the killing of so many people; we should support it anyway because it's really a standard way to solve conflicts. Beef is not murder, it's just that there's no other current way to get the meat off the cow in a nice and gentle way without killing it; so right now Beef is merely accidental man slaughter, until that changes.
See? It's fun to ignore flaws in arguments and stick to your straw man.
Oh, and next year will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop for sure, because it is really superior to anything out there, just like it has been for the past ten years...
-dZ.
Now you're talking!
dZ.
This can be easily fixed by defining the service classes by industry standard or by government regulation. What you described is a single and narrow problem that occurs in a wild-wild-west scenario, without any regulation; not an inherent flaw of service prioritizing.
Since the prioritization by its nature means that the bandwidth will be unevenly distributed, this may affect the revenue of the network provider (since a small set of entities may consume a greater percentage of the total bandwidth); and so charging a higher fee for this priority is warranted and standard in any other industry.
The "Net Neutralitites" seek to ban any sort of prioritization for hire.
-dZ.
Actually, that's not quite true. The analogy would be more accurate if your hypothetical Highway Company made rules that said,
1. Aall vehicles classed as Consumer Vehicle need to yield to any vehicle classed as Emergency Vehicle when the latter is on the roadway.
2. All vehicles classed as "Taxi Vehicle" will have priority on congested intersections during peak traffic hours.
And for the purpose of this new rule, the following registration procedures should be imposed:
1. Any customer can register their vehicle as class Consumer Vehicle.
2. Only special organizations designated and controlled by local governmental authorities can register vehicles as class Emergency Vehicle.
3. Any commercial organization can register their fleet as class Taxi Vehicle by paying an additional registration surcharge and priority access fee.
While the big boogieman being thrown about by "Net Neutrality" proponents is that communication networks want to charge you more or give their own services more priority, what is actually being proposed is charging more for those types of services which require a higher prioritization, such as VoIP and Video-on-Demand streaming. "Services" in this context should be understood as Network Services, in the sense of Internet and general communications protocols--not, as some seem to imply, merely individual commercial services or products.
Contrary to what many believe, this is compatible with the original intent and spirit of the Internet.
-dZ.
Bullshit! If he was dead the whole time, how did he defeat Professor Snape Gruber and henchman Karl Godunov at the end, before the big finale when the entire top of the building exploded?
-dZ.
You must have JavaScript turned on.
Plebes, pshaw!
Perhaps he realizes that there's more money to be made in Apple apps. There have been a couple of articles lately on the tech press to this effect.
-dZ.