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Apple TV needs an upgrade...
- Thread starter capn7
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So what can you possibly want it to do that doesn't involve making it easy to play pirated/downloaded Movies or TV Shows ?
Full HD would be nice, but BluRay titles will continue to carry a price premium for many, many years to come. Studios will not be keen to allow this to be available for sale as a download format.
Right now it does more than I need of it, I can rip all my DVDs, all my home movies, some 420 movies, 1000 TV episodes (a lot of 24, CSI, LOST and Bob The Builder) all available with a simple remote and a friendly interface. Having to encode into H264 is not an issue, but I can understand that it may be if you rely heavily on XviD, the choice of pirates.
Still, with Google having nothing to show just yet despite all the announcements, we'll wait to hear your in-depth and critical review.
Full HD would be nice, but BluRay titles will continue to carry a price premium for many, many years to come. Studios will not be keen to allow this to be available for sale as a download format.
Right now it does more than I need of it, I can rip all my DVDs, all my home movies, some 420 movies, 1000 TV episodes (a lot of 24, CSI, LOST and Bob The Builder) all available with a simple remote and a friendly interface. Having to encode into H264 is not an issue, but I can understand that it may be if you rely heavily on XviD, the choice of pirates.
Still, with Google having nothing to show just yet despite all the announcements, we'll wait to hear your in-depth and critical review.
All I mean is that, so close to an actual product release, Google has absolutely nothing to show for the product, except a crude PowerPoint presentation that says nothing about the featureset. So we're going to to have millions of "TV Channels" to chose from, chewing up your internet bandwidth, perhaps they mean YouTube. And there'll be a Chrome browser built-in. Internet on the telly. Been done before by a few upstarts, as a concept it sucks. Really. It's all to do with users hating having to read text on TV screens. Don't even start considering "broadcast safe" etc.
Their presentation video also has a few false technical claims in it, carefully worded so that they are asking a question to which we're meant to assume the answer is YES. Advertising eh ?
I'm not dissing you, I would buy one if I thought it could do all my AppleTV can do and more, but I just expected something more concrete from the announcement.
so...playing 1080p and/or higher bit rates=enabling piracy??? and why would this be apple's concern, anyway?
how about so i could play home video from my hd camcorder? how about so i can rip blu-rays i've purchased to keep them safe from my toddler's grimy, destructive hands? it's laughable that the apple tv still can't play full 1080p hd video.
that sounds really similar to what you use your apple tv for, except i prefer higher quality. how is it unreasonable to hope apple provides a product which allows this? fwiw the original poster didn't mention codecs. there are other things the apple tv can't do like i just mentioned.
I did say "Full HD would be nice". But just how many BluRay movies / tv shows are actually 1080 ? I seem to find that anything above 540p qualifies as HD, and if your selected movie has an insane aspect ration like 2.8:1 (Ben Hur), even 2.35:1 (Gladiator, Lord of the Rings), you end up with 720 at best. Still, Full HD would be nice. I do think it may be something to do with the CPU grunt required to decode 1080p over 720p may be just too much for the unit. Or rather the heat that would be produced may be too much, it is a sealed unit and mine is constantly warm even when idle, it's uncomfortably hot when watching even non-HD content.
We'd also have to discuss whether ripping BluRay is Fair Use, or if it is contrary to the DMCA.
See, I have no issue with havng to encode my camcorder video to H264 so it can be played through AppleTV, takes the MacPro seconds to encode anything.
And I don't record in full HD any more, it just creates bigger files and quality difference above 720 is minimal - the same amount of light comes through the lens. Same with my still cameras - all Nikons - 12MP, but I never shoot above 6MP (well OK, a few tripod-assisted scenery shots at 12MP).
It does sound like we use it for very similar purposes - I too have 2 toddlers who love nothing more than handling, bending, sucking on discs too. I keep mine on the top shelves of the bookcases. I even use a few printable DVD-Rs (printed with dinosaurs and pirates and the like) as decoys to keep them away from the real discs. But I don't think Apple sees us as their target audience for AppleTV, Movies and TV Shows on demand seems to be plan, and for that the studios may insist on, and bandwidth may demand (and again heat from CPU decoding may also demand) 720p maximum.
Still, who knows what will happen at WWDC ?
Huh? Blu-ray movies are not that expensive anymore. Quick search for "blu-ray" shows The dark knight for ten bucks and the three-disk edition of Star Trek for twenty.
Apple should get rid of the hard drive and made it a streaming device. Introduce their own free hulu-like streaming service with iAds, or iAd-free for a subscription. iTunes needs to get away from this $1.99/episode nonsense.
I would purchase a streaming only apple tv w/out a hard drive IF it was capable of using external hard drives which the consumer purchases on their own. everything else i agree with.
That's a good price for BluRay. Here in the UK, The Dark Knight might be £12 BluRay, while the DVD is £3. Less popular movies maintain the same price ratio, ie. £10 DVD, £25 BD. The discs and the players are still expensive here because I presume enough people are willing to pay top dollar for them.
Can see your point about the hard-drive. Love the hard drive in mine. Means I can load up 60 movies, 500 TV shows, 10,000 photos, 10,000 music tracks and take my AppleTV with me wherever I go in the world. Get to a hotel in Singapore / Kuala Lumpur, Auckland / Dubai, etc, etc at 1am and need to uwind, or keep the kids up for the 4 hour stopover to the next flight. Easy, plug it in to the hotel TV with my HDMI and I'm settled. Business lounges are fine if it's daytime and I'm by myself, but overnight in even the first class lounges in the East is not a pretty sight (Dubai is the worst, Singapore is the best).
Same when I'm at my destinatin for x weeks. All the kids favourites on hand if the local kids TV doesn't cut it. Plus the 15 hours of home video of the kids to show to their grandparents, plus all those photos. Maybe not what Apple intended it for, but we all travel internationally these days (well maybe not the US).
Guess I'm just looking for someone to come up with a few new ideas for use of the Apple TV that would be cost effective for Apple to implement - we'll leave legality out of it for now.