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

There's got to be an 1080p ATV3 coming out

class77

class77

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 16, 2010
831
92
With the announcement of Air Play in new OSX Mountain Lion, there is absolutely no way that Apple is going to drag down the rest of it's 1080p(or better) resolutions for it's entire product line. Apple has to know that there will be a ton of 1080 ATV3 sold so that mirroring from the Mac to the TV won't be totally degraded. I don't think Apple will be so dumb as to only offer this only with a $2000+ 42/46/55" TV. I also think that's why Tim Cook announced the number of ATV units sold in the 4th quarter for the first time.

Mountain Lion is coming out this summer, so I'm predicting the bottle neck in the whole system(ATV2) will be gathering dust by then and a new ATV3 will be rolled out. Perhaps it will come as soon as the iPad 3 announcement.
 
Last edited:
class77 said:
With the announcement of Air Play in new OSX Mountain Lion, there is absolutely no way that Apple is going to drag down the rest of it's 1080p(or better) resolutions for it's entire product line. Apple has to know that there will be a ton of 1080 ATV3 sold so that mirroring from the Mac to the TV won't be totally degraded. I don't think Apple will be so dumb as to only offer this only with a $2000+ 42/46/55" TV. I also think that's why Tim Cook announced the number of ATV units sold in the 4th quarter for the first time.

Mountain Lion is coming out this summer, so I'm predicting the bottle neck in the whole system(ATV2) will be gathering dust by then and a new ATV3 will be rolled out. Perhaps it will come as soon as the iPad 3 announcement.
Click to expand...

Yep, should be coming out very soon, since retailer can't even re stock on Apple TV2s anymore.
 
Wouldn't AirPlay at 1080 be heavily handicapped or be impossible by the lack of most wifi network bandwidth?
 
CocoaPuffs said:
Wouldn't AirPlay at 1080 be heavily handicapped or be impossible by the lack of most wifi network bandwidth?
Click to expand...

I don't think so. I mean, you probably won't be streaming Blu-Ray quality type stuff that's in the 20-30Mbps range. But 5-10Mbps (My ATV rips are 720p Blu-Rays at about 5Mbps) works quite well over a normal wireless N network. Higher end routers can support all the way up to 450Mbps so I think they're going to be just fine.
 
DeusInvictus7 said:
I don't think so. I mean, you probably won't be streaming Blu-Ray quality type stuff that's in the 20-30Mbps range. But 5-10Mbps (My ATV rips are 720p Blu-Rays at about 5Mbps) works quite well over a normal wireless N network. Higher end routers can support all the way up to 450Mbps so I think they're going to be just fine.
Click to expand...

Movie streams are cached; I am referring to AirPlay mirroring.
 
If it auto-senses that you don't have the bandwidth, it could:
  • drop frames which may not look that good
  • downconvert to 720p or less
Better hardware can play lessor software. So a 1080p :apple:TV3 doesn't require everything that flows to it at 1080p. It will play 720p or SD at their fullest too.

But for those set up so that it can work, they'll enjoy 1080p instead of something less.
 
I wonder if this planned ATV upgrade was the reason why Front Row was left out of Lion to nudge us into getting an ATV3?
 
class77 said:
I wonder if this planned ATV upgrade was the reason why Front Row was left out of Lion to nudge us into getting an ATV3?
Click to expand...

Actually, they might be just that devious... I mean, Jobs had a what, five year plan for Apple? They upgrade once a year, so he had at least three or four upgrades planned...
 
hafr said:
How can you tell?
Click to expand...

The resolution to output is 1920 x 1200 - although it looks like its for another device. It would be a bit silly to allow to Airplay from OSX in 1080p but not allow the Apple TV to do the same.
 
DeusInvictus7 said:
I don't think so. I mean, you probably won't be streaming Blu-Ray quality type stuff that's in the 20-30Mbps range. But 5-10Mbps (My ATV rips are 720p Blu-Rays at about 5Mbps) works quite well over a normal wireless N network. Higher end routers can support all the way up to 450Mbps so I think they're going to be just fine.
Click to expand...

I'm fortunate to get 10-15 Mbps from TWC Roadrunner. It doesn't matter as much if you're streaming a local file from device to device on your LAN, you're getting whatever your router serves (usually between 200-450 Mbps depending on the age of it).
 
I didn't say or implied that it was.

There's a noticeable lag with AirPlay as is, if it is upgraded to 1080, the lag will likely be worse.
 
CocoaPuffs said:
I didn't say or implied that it was.

There's a noticeable lag with AirPlay as is, if it is upgraded to 1080, the lag will likely be worse.
Click to expand...

Which device are you using to airplay to the ATV2, and what kind of content? I haven't noticed the noticeable lag when sending any video stream from my 3GS to the ATV2.
 
hafr said:
Which device are you using to airplay to the ATV2, and what kind of content? I haven't noticed the noticeable lag when sending any video stream from my 3GS to the ATV2.
Click to expand...

Did you not read any other posts in this thread?

Video streams are cached, AirPlay mirror isn't.
 
CocoaPuffs said:
Did you not read any other posts in this thread?

Video streams are cached, AirPlay mirror isn't.
Click to expand...

Yeah, which is why I mentioned XBMC in an earlier post (when you clarified that you were talking about mirroring and not video streams), since it doesn't buffer more than a few seconds. If XBMC can handle 1080p streaming with no problem on the ATV2 (including action packed scenes), then mirroring 1080p shouldn't be too much of a problem either.

Granted, airplay mirroring a full screen 1080p action scene would require a very stable connection for flawless playback.

Don't assume people don't understand what you're saying, ask them what they mean instead. Also, make sure you actually specify mirroring in order to avoid confusion.
 
CocoaPuffs said:
Movie streams are cached; I am referring to AirPlay mirroring.
Click to expand...

Depends on what the newer wifi can stream. Apple is trying to up the streaming via wifi, but I can't remember the specifics of past rumors/articles.

I tried streaming 1080 between Mac and PS3 (because you can already do 1080 ATV-type things with any PS3) and it stutters bad. My wifi and the PS3 wifi are probably not wide enough to shovel the info around. Had to transfer 1080 video to a USB drive and play that through the PS3... I think I could use an ethernet cable as well to join the two, but that is inconvenient.

If ATV3 comes out, I'd assume it is an A6 chip and will play 1080 fine, but then it all depends on the wifi.
 
Airplay Video uses a compressed .264 container to transmit the video, encoded, from the source device to the display. They take advantage of the dedicated chip to handle the encoding in hardware instead of software, so there's very little penalty in terms of performance.

Doing the same thing with 1080p video instead of the output from the iPhone is child's play. There are tons of solutions on the market currently that stream 1080p video. Indeed, there are many routers that perform just fine streaming multiple 1080p streams simultaneously. If we start talking about any kind of an adaptive bandwidth stream, then the bandwidth demands become even easier to deal with.

Oh, and lest I forget, the wifi hardware inside most recent MacBooks has the ability to support a couple of separate streams at the same time. See Airdrop for details. If Apple wanted to they could have the stream go directly from the MacBook to the Apple TV and bypass the router entirely.

Frankly, 1080p streaming is a piece of cake. I don't see there being any technical issues at all to this that Apple can't overcome.
 
hafr said:
Yeah, which is why I mentioned XBMC in an earlier post (when you clarified that you were talking about mirroring and not video streams), since it doesn't buffer more than a few seconds. If XBMC can handle 1080p streaming with no problem on the ATV2 (including action packed scenes), then mirroring 1080p shouldn't be too much of a problem either.

Granted, airplay mirroring a full screen 1080p action scene would require a very stable connection for flawless playback.

Don't assume people don't understand what you're saying, ask them what they mean instead. Also, make sure you actually specify mirroring in order to avoid confusion.
Click to expand...

I actually assumed that you would have understood what I said if you had read what I wrote.

You said it yourself, XBMC does buffer at least few seconds, and even at 500ms latency, that itself is enough to render 1080 mirroring worthless.

hafr said:
Granted, airplay mirroring a full screen 1080p action scene would require a very stable connection for flawless playback.
Click to expand...

Yes indeed, hence my original statement said that 1080 mirroring is likely to be handicapped by "most" available wifi routers.

Anyhow, I was just asking the question since 1080 mirroring was brought up in the original post, and I thought that it would be rather moot to have it if very few can utilize it.
 
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