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New Apple TV DOES Handle 1080P

Diveflo said:
Well the ATV only has a 100mbits card inside, so you've got a limitation there.
Then in the real world a wired connection through a router will get you what? 70? 60? Overhead protocol etc.
And then there's your REAL problem: a 50mbits rip does not have 50mbits all the time...it got peaks, and these are were the fun starts. I don't want to watch a movie where every time a scene has a lot of fast movement my Apple TV starts to choke.
Click to expand...

10MB/s with samba as a protocol is pretty easy to achieve out of the box - I think 60mb/s is a little bit too low of an estimate, but either way it's still a fair bit higher than the maximum bitrate being talked about - and yes, we're not taking into account the buffering that any streaming hardware will do.

My comment was more about refuting the network bandwidth nonsense that is floating about :)

The real issue people are trying to get answered is quite obviously about the maximum bitrate and encoding switches the atv hardware will handle. Obviously the device won't push 1080 to your tv, but people have accepted this and just want the machine to display their current content without encoding duplicate copies.
 
I have tried everything to get 1080p to play back smoothly with bitrates that warrant going to 1080p and for the most part im having no luck. Video with resolutions of 1920 by 1080 no matter how i encode just drop too many frames.

This is disappointing.
 
Diveflo said:
Well the ATV only has a 100mbits card inside, so you've got a limitation there.
Then in the real world a wired connection through a router will get you what? 70? 60? ...
Click to expand...
On my old Apple TV connected to a PowerPC Mac mini I get 80 to 90Mbps over 100Mb Ethernet. I've measured this many times using both timed transfer tests and the network activity graph in Mac OS X's performance monitor (which typically shows a perfectly flat and consisten line with no dropouts). Wired Ethernet is pretty efficient, something that can't be said of 802.11 wireless.
 
I understand that pushing a full 1080p movie might be difficult but has anyone tried movies in between 720p and 1080p. Most of my movies are in mkv containers in between, often around 1600 x 900. The bitrate for the audio and video combined is usually not more than 5 MBps. Would the new ATV be able to handle that. In my digital collection I only have a few full 1080p movies. Even those are compressed to around 11 gb and have a bitrate around 11 MBps. How would those fare? I have bookmarked this forum because if the new ATV can work with these then I will ditch my Mac Mini/PLex setup and move towards a much cheaper option. Thanks!
 
BlackMangoTree said:
For the new Apple TV a good setting is:

ref=5:me=umh:b-adapt=2:weightp=0:direct=auto:no-dct-decimate=1:merange=32:bframes=5:subq=9:vbv-maxrate=12000:vbv-bufsize=12000

No filters and set the resolution to 1280 by 720 or lower depending on the movie. Set the Audio to your liking and the subtitles and set the RF to 22 for HD and 20 for SD.

The results are very good quality video and pretty small file sizes and the file will play on Apple TV 2, iPhone 4, iPod Touch and obviously your computer.
Click to expand...


what are you selecting originally, High Profile? I am confused on how to remove the filters as I am currently seeing 2 when I select High Profile
 
That was an earlier setting i was using, i now just use the High Profile Preset so disregard that advanced string and just select High Profile and just the resolution.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
That was an earlier setting i was using, i now just use the High Profile Preset so disregard that advanced string and just select High Profile and just the resolution.
Click to expand...

ok what about the RF? default of 20 or are you still using 22 for high def
 
BlackMangoTree said:
That was an earlier setting i was using, i now just use the High Profile Preset so disregard that advanced string and just select High Profile and just the resolution.
Click to expand...

I'm a complete novice. Where exactly does one adjust the resolution in Handbrake?
 
In the tool bar you will see picture setting, click on that.

Select the high profile setting
Set the Subtitles to your liking and the Audio.
The RF under the video TAB i usually put to 18 for that little extra quality.
I turn off all the filters for HD and most DVD's
 
BlackMangoTree said:
In the tool bar you will see picture setting, click on that.

Select the high profile setting
Set the Subtitles to your liking and the Audio.
The RF under the video TAB i usually put to 18 for that little extra quality.
I turn off all the filters for HD and most DVD's
Click to expand...

Hi Blackmangotree, I understand that you have done a good amount of testing with the new ATV. What is the highest bitrate/resolution that you were able to watch without any dropped frames. I have a lot of movies that are around 1600 x 900. The bitrate is usually around 5 MBps. The file sizes are around 4 gb. How do you think these files will fare with ATV2? Thanks!
 
I ripped several 1080p trailers into 720p and 1080p mp4 files.

All of the 720p files play fine. Most of the 1080p files hiccuped during the playback.

I have decided to rip my blu-ray disks into 720p files as they work and look fine.

I still have the disks if I want to go 1080p in the future.

I only rip what I own.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
In the tool bar you will see picture setting, click on that.

Select the high profile setting
Set the Subtitles to your liking and the Audio.
The RF under the video TAB i usually put to 18 for that little extra quality.
I turn off all the filters for HD and most DVD's
Click to expand...

The lower the RF the better the quality?

How do you turn off all filters?
 
Yes lower the RF the better quality.

I choose 18 because any lower 17 and down i don't see much improvement and the file just balloons out.

To turn off all the filters select Picture Settings from the toolbar and under filters set them to off.
 
Just registered so that I could reply to this thread. I did some Googling on stuttering and found this thread. I've reported in the Handbrake forums and in the following Apple support forum thread that I'm having problems even with 720p content:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2599423

Note: There are several of us reporting the problem in that thread.

To summarize, the problem is not related to the network. The movie has been fully loaded to the Apple TV's buffer. For those who do not own a new Apple TV, when the status bar is all white, the movie is fully loaded to the buffer. When it is only partially loaded to the buffer, the white portion of the status bar is how much has been loaded to the buffer, and the gray portion behind it, has not.

The interesting thing is that it appears that the stutter/judder/dropped frames are actually *more* frequent when the movie is *fully* loaded to the buffer. That seems counterintuitive, but there you go. One person experiencing this problem theorized that perhaps the Apple TV is getting ambitious once it's loaded the movie to the buffer and is doing some sort of background task.

In any case, the movie that I'm using to test with is Monsters vs Aliens. The opening scene (right after the film stock melts away) shows some part of the universe, with the camera panning through the asteroid rings around a planet, then centering the camera on another planet, which then explodes. That panning sequence is good for noticing stutter/judder. I have a few different flavors of this movie converted via Handbrake. All play perfectly smoothly on my Acer Revo nettop running Windows 7 and XBMC. These 720p files also appear to play perfectly smoothly on my iPhone 4 (but the screen is so small that it's possible that there's a glitch that I'm just not seeing). One person indicated that they did not see the problem on their iPad, which is important because one theory/concern of mine is that the Apple TV's 256 MB of RAM could be insufficient (the iPhone 4 has 512MB). But as I don't have access to an iPad I can't confirm this first-hand.

My hope is to keep that thread towards the top of the Apple support forums and that they'll issue a firmware fix (assuming they *can* fix it).
 
I am experiencing the same issue.

Video i have encoded for the original Apple TV using Handbrake wen played back on the new Apple TV once the file is fully buffered onto the Apple TV it will stutter all over the place.

New encodes i have done using the latest nightly build of Handbrake using the High Profile preset playback perfect with no stuttering.

I am not 100% sure but i suspect this could be an issue with our TV's something to do with the fps and hz.

This is highly frustrating issue, i can't believe it was released with such a major flaw.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
New encodes i have done using the latest nightly build of Handbrake using the High Profile preset playback perfect with no stuttering.
Click to expand...
That's interesting. Most of my encodes of this test video were done with a nightly build using the High Profile setting, but it was a build I downloaded about two weeks ago. Can you share with me the specifics of which build you're using (and for which platform - I'm using the Windows GUI), and which settings, if any, that you changed after selecting the High Profile preset?

I'll be happy to do another encode using the same settings as you to see if my problems go away.
 
Some observations of mine, so far.

First, my setup. I've got the Apple TV connected to an Airport Extreme via Wi-Fi, a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro 8 core connected to a Gigabit switch, and a Syswan SW24 Dual WAN router.

I tested the Lion of Judah, and a Harry Potter trailer to see how they played. They both appear to play fine, no dropped frames/stuttering (I've been working in the television industry for over 20 years, so I know what to look for).

Looking at the Mini's processor load, it appears that the host computer is doing the conversion from 1080P to 720P. So, if you have a high load on your host while the video is being converted/streamed it may lead to dropped frames/stuttering, and once loaded into the Apple TVs buffer, it would repeat that same stuttering each time you play it.

Now, I still need to do a lot more testing, so I wouldn't consider my findings definitive by any means. But, if iTunes is having to convert a file to stream to the Apple TV, even if it's already a 720P file, and the host cpu is under heavy load, that may explain why some people are seeing the problem and others aren't.

Just my 2¢
 
LunaticRed said:
Some observations of mine, so far.I tested the Lion of Judah, and a Harry Potter trailer to see how they played. They both appear to play fine, no dropped frames/stuttering (I've been working in the television industry for over 20 years, so I know what to look for).
Click to expand...

Lion of Judah trailer has hell of a lot of dropped frames. I have played it on 3 different Apple TV's on 3 different TV's. There is no way in the world it plays smoothly. Just play the 720p version and see the difference.
 
hey blackmangotree, quick question for you.

i took an mkv (ripped straight from blu-ray) that was 1920x1080 and am using the high profile settings with no filters as u suggested in handbrake to try to get it down to 720p so that i can play it not only on apple tv2 but also ipad, iphone 4, etc...

however, when i try to scale down the resolution but keep the aspect ratio the same, the resulting file is 1744x720 not the standard 1280x720.


is this file going to play on my other i devices? if not, what needs to be done so that i can keep the scaling of the original blu-ray rip the same and have a file that will play not only on my apple tv2 but also on my other devices.


thanks in advance
 
You need to set anamorphic to none then it will scale down to 1280.

To know if it will play just rip 30 seconds worth of a moive and try it.
 
ok thanks.

also, what shuld the resulting file size given that my source is a MKV blu-ray rips (25-30 GB's) converted down to 720P using an RF of 18 and the High Profile Setting?

For my first rip I got a file that was 5.7 GB, which seems very high.

What size are you getting? Is there anyway to get a file that is only 3-4 GB with comparable quality? Are some of my settings wrong here?
 
BlackMangoTree said:
You need to set anamorphic to none then it will scale down to 1280.

To know if it will play just rip 30 seconds worth of a moive and try it.
Click to expand...

i set anamorphic to none however this didnt change anything

when i go into "picture settings" and bump height down to 720, width is still 1744.... the only way i can get the width down to 1280 is if the height is 528... is this correct? is 1280x528 still 720P?
 
Anamorphic is a technique they use to get extra picture quality. The Apple tv should play your 1744 by 720 picture fine.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
Anamorphic is a technique they use to get extra picture quality. The Apple tv should play your 1744 by 720 picture fine.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks last 2 questions for now

1. What rf do you suggest for blu-ray rips, and what is the avg filesize for your blu-ray ripped 720P movies

2. Do you change the auto crop setting? By default mine is on
 
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