I Bought an Apple TV Yesterday (1 Viewer)

[Dave Scarpa]

I got my 2nD ATV today, hooked it up in my Basement HT to an Older Mits 65" TV a 65802 pretty old set but still a very nice calibrated set, running 1080i thru component, I'm still Impressed especially by the Wireless, even in the basement this thing streams without missing a beat. Image still looks decent on well recorded material. I notice this unit does not get as hot as my unit upstairs so there seems to be some variance. I'm wondering if I should return the upstairs unit and hope I get a cooler one...

 

[Christ Reynolds]

What bitrate are you ripping your DVDs at?

The new Handbrake rocks, it supports chapters and 5.1 audio.

CJ

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Well Movies 2500 2 Pass AVC. TV Shows I vary I use Clonemobile alot, straight MP4 at about a 2070 bitrate, Larger file, but MP4 still looks nice, and Its a lot faster too.

 

[Chad A Wright]

It's been a while since I got my Apple TV so I thought I'd update everyone.

I absolutely love it. We download our favorite shows of iTunes. The best part has been movies. I've got almost 200 of them ripped to a 1TB hard drive. Just 300 more to go.

It's really made my collection more accessible. Maybe it's laziness, but picking a DVD of the shelf and watching it almost never happened. Now that we have instant access to so many, we are watching about one movie a night. It's weird how it works.

I'll be glad to have the entire collection on there. It's incredibly time consuming pulling the movies off with Handbrake. I've got a quad G5 so it's not as bad as it could be. It seems to rip in real time so a two-hour movie takes about two hours to rip. Much better than my Powerbook G4 which was averaging 2 frames-per-second. I don't even bother with it anymore.

Once I'm done, the Apple TV will be a great gateway into all of our content. Podcasts, music, movies, tv shows. Basically everything. Heck, even YouTube now. And I was shocked and how some (not all, but some) of the YouTube videos hold up on a 62" TV.

I'm a huge Apple TV fan. Plus it's already payed for itself not having a $70+ a month satellite bill.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

I received my Apple TV last week, and I am hooked. I absolutely love it.

CJ

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

I just wanted to address Ron's old post about music streaming -- the Airport Express does NOT allow you to pick a song, it just streams what's playing on your computer, wherever it may be. That's great if you have a laptop and bring it into the room with you, but it can stink if you have a desktop with a whole lotta hard drive space sitting upstairs in the office.

The AppleTV interface for music is great.

 

[Chad A Wright]

Yeah, the Apple TV is infinitely better than the Airport Express for music. It's nice being able to surf your entire library from the couch.

Plus is has the added advantage of being able to instantly select some mood music if the wife wants to .... "discuss the budget" .... as we tell the kids.

Yeah, she'll definitely kill me if she ever reads that. However, I feel that's an advantage that should be listed on the Apple TV box, but isn't

 

[Christ Reynolds]

I want to know the name you gave THAT playlist

CJ

 

[Chad A Wright]

I named it bowchikawowow.

 

[DaveF]

A belated follow-up, how's the image quality on the AppleTV? There's now an AppleTV demo at my local Apple store, so I played a bit after picking up iLife 08.

I was struck by the poor video quality.

It was connected directly to a 30"-ish HDTV. I saw it had an episode of BSG S3, which caught my attention. (Oooh! HD BSG!) I hit play, and it looked marginally better than the copies a friend makes me with his standard-def DVD-based DVR. I switched over to a demo loop of The Incredibles, presuming this was an example of what I'd get from movie downloads from iTunes. It looked worse than my regular DVD.

Is this representative of AppleTV? Are the TV and movie downloads from iTunes such middling quality?

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Well they are ok, but remember they share duty with the Ipod so they have to be encoded to their Limits, which is 640x whatever at a 1500 bitrate. They are watchable thou. If you encode your own files it can look very very good. I use the Turbo264 stick accelerator and the Apple TV profile and am quite happy with the results

 

[Chad A Wright]

It's the stuff off iTunes that looks like that. I've only downloaded one movie of iTunes and it was noticeably worse than DVD quality. However, films I pull of DVDs (via Handbrake) look just as good as the DVD. I can't really see a difference anyway.

TV shows off iTunes aren't DVD quality either, but once you get sucked into a show, you rarely notice. I've downloaded season 1 of 30Rock and Season 3 of The Office. At the beginning of each show you're thinking "wow, that doesn't look great." I've always noticed towards the middle of an episode I don't even recognize the difference. I've got a 62" DLP.

It's not HD (yet), but it's so convenient I'll sacrifice a little quality to have everything in my library at the touch of a button.

What I can't wait for is when iTunes offers HD and everyone starts to complain it's not the "same" quality coming off Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Let's just acknowledge out of the gate that it won't be as good. It will probably be a long while before downloaded content matches the quality of physical media.

It's just deciding if the technology is worth the downgrade in quality. If I wasn't pulling most of my content from DVDs, I don't know that it would be. However, in my current situation, I love the AppleTV.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

I Love mine as well. I use it for mostly TV shows, SO I have about close to a terrabyte serving TV stuff, that I have at the ready to watch, all ripped from my library. I don't do movies because I'd rather watch a movie upconverted from my Toshiba A2 than ripped from a disk, plus how many times will you watch a movie vs spaced taken up by said film. TV shows have much greater rewatchability. Plus I have Podcasts and Youtube at my call. The ATV has basically become my DVR, I reencode off the Air stuff to H264 and have all my Weekly shows ready to view...

 

[DaveF]

Thanks! I knew that iTunes provide 480p, but for some reason had it in my head that it also sold 720p material. Maybe the AppleTV allows 720p output, and I expected to see clean, smooth video.

The AppleTV is a neat product, but doesn't fit my budget and habits. Now, if they had HD movie download rentals for $5, that would be very interesting to me. Perhaps in a future iteration.

 

[Craig S]

Apple TV is capable of putting out very high-quality video, but it can't do anything if the source isn't up to snuff. I still can't figure out why Apple released this product without any HD material in the iTunes store to show it off.

There are a few video podcasts that have moved to 720P and these look quite good on AppleTV. Two that come to mind are Macbreak (video version) & The Merlin Show. And they're free!! If you check these out be sure to select the high-def (or large) feeds.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

I guess it just depends on the source material, like any device. I don't purchase from the iTunes store, I only rip my own DVDs to my hard drive, so Apple TV's has only looked exceptional to me. It's my favorite piece of technology, I wish I had it years ago. Add in cheap rentals straight from Apple TV, and I'd probably never leave the couch.

CJ

 

[spider]

ATV is great for me and familie and friends always like it. Screening pictures in HD is cool especially when you can sit on the couch.
I gave Apple/iTunes fully control of my music libarey. All my Music and that is alot is stored on an external 250GB hooked up to my iMac and via wired network and switch connected to ATV. Also my step kids pc is connected to it. So they can listen to ther stuff on the big stage.
So i use it mainly for music and pictures. But also TVshows and Movies. Trailer streaming is realy cool too. Just wish the Internetradio channels from iTunes would be able to stream to ATV.

Sorry for pulling a old thread up
/Ronny

 

[Nelson Au]

Interesting read! I have been considering an ATV for some time. I don't mind pulling the DVDs fromt the cabinet to view them. So I may not rip my collection to view that way.

What I am more interested in is making it a DVR. I have a Miglia TV Mini I record broadcasts onto. What I do now is burn them onto a DVD and watch on the big TV. If I had an ATV, I'd send the file from the G5 in the home office onto the big TV in the viewing room, or with a Mini Mac, I'd connect the Miglia to it to record to that and stream back to the big TV.

Are there others doing this too? I guess I won't be using an ATV to it's fullest this way.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Does this play xVid? I store most of my video content in that format because the file size is much better than you get with QT or MPGs.

 

[Ken Chan]

No Xvid support out of the box, but supposedly you can hack the Apple TV to add it.

BTW, QuickTime is a container (like AVI) and there are many MPEG variants -- Xvid itself is MPEG-4 -- so comparing sizes with "QT" or "MPG" doesn't say much.