Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Is the atv2 capable of doing 1080p with an iOS update?

C

Che Castro

macrumors 603
Original poster
May 21, 2009
6,007
793
Or the hardware is just not there?

If not

the next apple tv 3 will have 1080p...


Will they stop making the current atv2 or lower the price

Or keep the current price of $99 for the atv2 & have the atv3 cost more?

I dont think there going back to a hardrive inside the atv again

So a media streamer with no hardrive would be a tough sell if it cost more then $100, unless there saving all the good stuff like appstore & games for the atv3

What do you guys think
 
The current Apple TV hardware is capable of playing back a full 1080p media file. But Apple's firmware limits it. How do I know the hardware can do this? The iPhone 3Gs can playback a 1080p m4v without any problems.
 
Last edited:
I remember with the iphone 3G apple sayd no video recording

In came cycorder


Now with an ios update iphone 3g can do video recording
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Che Castro said:
Or the hardware is just not there?

If not

the next apple tv 3 will have 1080p...


Will they stop making the current atv2 or lower the price

Or keep the current price of $99 for the atv2 & have the atv3 cost more?

I dont think there going back to a hardrive inside the atv again

So a media streamer with no hardrive would be a tough sell if it cost more then $100, unless there saving all the good stuff like appstore & games for the atv3

What do you guys think
Click to expand...

There's no need for hard drives anymore. 100mbit wifi is fine for streaming 1080p.

I have 3 appletv's in my house all streaming fine from one mac mini with a drobo 4TB.

FTW
 
I've got one streaming my whole home library...

I've got one streaming my whole home library. The Primary interface seems to be 720p though, as my Samsung LCD notifies me whenever it changes resolutions (kinda annoying, but in this instance useful). My little jailbroken device is a dream.
 
Intell said:
The current ATV2 is capable of full 1080p playback.
Click to expand...

kind of a touchy subject. the ATV2 can OUTPUT to 1080p (i.e. upscale 720p movies, etc). that is the main thing advertised, this taken from their website.

apple.com/appletv/specs.html said:
H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
Click to expand...

additionally - as we have discovered through various tests it is possible to playback a 1080p movie on the ATV2, but there have been various results, such as bitrate limitations and whatnot.
 
DoFoT9 said:
kind of a touchy subject. the ATV2 can OUTPUT to 1080p (i.e. upscale 720p movies, etc). that is the main thing advertised, this taken from their website.
Click to expand...

Now that I reread my post I see that it was worded oddly.

The current Apple TV hardware is capable of playing back a full 1080p media file. But Apple's firmware limits it. How do I know the hardware can do this? The iPhone 3Gs can playback a 1080p m4v without any problems.
 
Intell said:
Now that I reread my post I see that it was worded oddly.

The current Apple TV hardware is capable of playing back a full 1080p media file. But Apple's firmware limits it. How do I know the hardware can do this? The iPhone 3Gs can playback a 1080p m4v without any problems.
Click to expand...

ahhh. i was a bit confused by your comment and may have jumped the gun a little.

but sure, all those devices can play back 1080p, its not very hard. even the original appleTV hardware was capable of this. its more the bitrate that is the problem.
 
Decoding and outputting (rendering to screen) are two vastly different things. Even when 1080p is decoded its downscaled to 720p to the renderer then upscaled to your 1080p set on the atvs.
 
maroot said:
Can it do it without choking? Netflix struggles with SD at times. If they can improve the throughput, then maybe...
Click to expand...

There are a bunch of threads about that topic. The ATV itself is fine with streaming. Netflix connectivity specifically has some issues with connective consistency. Ive noticed it's improved if you use ethernet rather than Wifi.
 
DoFoT9 said:
kind of a touchy subject. the ATV2 can OUTPUT to 1080p (i.e. upscale 720p movies, etc). that is the main thing advertised, this taken from their website...
Click to expand...
I'm not certain what you mean by that statement. As far as I know the ATV2 output is locked to 720p, there is no way for the user to select 1080i/p or even 480p as an OUTPUT. One could speculate that it could do other output resolutions (particularly 480p, since there is/was a problem with some TVs where the signal would drop to 480p rather than sync to 720p), but in any case Apple only supports output at 720p.

DoFoT9 said:
...but sure, all those devices can play back 1080p, its not very hard. even the original appleTV hardware was capable of this. its more the bitrate that is the problem.
Click to expand...
Again, I'm not certain what you mean here. The ATV1 could OUTPUT at 1080i/p, but the maximum source or decode resolution was in the 720p24 range. Hacked/jailbroken ATV1s could perhaps do a little better than 720p24, but the only way to get usable 1080p decode on an ATV1 is to add a third-party hardware video decoder like the Broadcom Crystal HD.

As for the OP, I suspect that the ATV2 might be able to decode 1080p content but frankly I doubt that Apple will ever enable that resolution on the ATV2 (so the question is kind of moot). Note, when I say might I mean that we'd have to know that it can robustly and reliably decode high-quality 1080p content. Thus far all we have seen is that the A4 processor/GPU can decode random samples of 1080p that have been tried by a small group of users (including myself), but that doesn't prove that it could handle high-quality 1080p content day-in, day-out without any problems or display artifacts.
 
Last edited:
Agreed, there is no way to get the ATV2 to output 1080p at the moment. The XBMC people seem to think that it's not possible for them to get around this limitation, though it's not clear whether this is a hardware or firmware issue.

I think 1080p output is desirable even if the ATV2 can't decode all 1080p material, simply because a lot of HD video is encoded at 24fps and the best way to display it is at 1080p24.
 
fpnc said:
I'm not certain what you mean by that statement. As far as I know the ATV2 output is locked to 720p, there is no way for the user to select 1080i/p or even 480p as an OUTPUT. One could speculate that it could do other output resolutions (particularly 480p, since there is/was a problem with some TVs where the signal would drop to 480p rather than sync to 720p), but in any case Apple only supports output at 720p.


Again, I'm not certain what you mean here. The ATV1 could OUTPUT at 1080i/p, but the maximum source or decode resolution was in the 720p24 range. Hacked/jailbroken ATV1s could perhaps do a little better than 720p24, but the only way to get usable 1080p decode on an ATV1 is to add a third-party hardware video decoder like the Broadcom Crystal HD.

As for the OP, I suspect that the ATV2 might be able to decode 1080p content but frankly I doubt that Apple will ever enable that resolution on the ATV2 (so the question is kind of moot). Note, when I say might I mean that we'd have to know that it can robustly and reliably decode high-quality 1080p content. Thus far all we have seen is that the A4 processor/GPU can decode random samples of 1080p that have been tried by a small group of users (including myself), but that doesn't prove that it could handle high-quality 1080p content day-in, day-out without any problems or display artifacts.
Click to expand...

fpnc - you are obviously forgetting the few page discussion we had on this sometime last year ;)

might be worth re-reading?
 
maroot said:
Can it do it without choking? Netflix struggles with SD at times. If they can improve the throughput, then maybe...
Click to expand...

From what I understand, there is a difference between the HD streaming experience on iTunes content vs Netflix content.

With iTunes, the device pre-caches more of the stream (but a higher bitrate than Netflix), and the resultant image has less artifacting than NF.

A Netflix stream will start quicker, but at a lower bitrate and more blocking, etc.
 
DoFoT9 said:
fpnc - you are obviously forgetting the few page discussion we had on this sometime last year ;)

might be worth re-reading?
Click to expand...
Okay, I just reviewed that thread and I still stand by everything I said (both then and now).

In fact, here is the key portion of our last exchange on that thread where you pretty much resigned to the fact that the ATV1 with its 1GHz Pentium CPU and NVIDIA 7300Go would probably have difficulty with 1080p H.264 decode:
fpnc said:
Okay, I looked at those links and frankly they don't seem conclusive (thanks, however, for providing them). In fact, there are a few sections from those links which seem to place some doubt on your claim that the Apple TV's GPU could easily handle H.264 encoded, 1080p video. For example, that second link was from a user who was having problems with 1080p playback until he upgraded his Core 2 Duo PC system to use a multi-threaded player and upped the CPU clock to 2.33GHz (he was still having some problems when the CPU was running at only 1.86GHz).
Click to expand...
DoFoT9 said:
the links i posted aren't completely sound, as i said - but they do indicate that with the aid of the GPU - 1080p playback might be possible. unfortunately, with further analysis, it looks like the P4 will not be powerful enough to support the GPU...the 7900Go chip CAN decode full h264 1080p content, i know that much haha the 7300Go is a bit iffy.
Click to expand...
In any case, in its current configuration and with the current Apple firmware/software the ATV1 can NOT decode 1080p video. Enough said, I think.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back