Apple TV - Part 2: Apple Enters the Digital Home
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 26, 2007 1:22 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Movies: Not Pirate Friendly, yet
If you download all of your movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store, then Apple TV is perfect for you. You can set Apple TV to sync unwatched movies/TV shows, certain ones or simply the most recent ones. If you purchased them from the iTunes Store, they are already in the required .m4v format (QuickTime's H.264 wrapper) and Apple TV can sync/stream and play them with no additional steps.
The problem is that as popular as the iTunes Store may be, there's a far larger group of users who have content that wasn't procured from it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it: Apple TV will not play content that's not in its requisite .m4v format. There is already work being done on solutions to this limitation but they aren't quite automated enough yet for mainstream use in our opinion.
Not only is Apple TV picky about the file format and codec of videos, there are bit rate and resolution limitations. According to Apple, H.264 video is supported only at bit rates up to 5Mbps. For H.264 content, the maximum supported resolution is 1280 x 720 at 24 fps or 960 x 540 at 30 fps. The bit rate limitations explain how Apple is able to get away with playback on a 1GHz Pentium M (even with the help of the GeForce 7300). Keep in mind that H.264 content on Blu-ray and HD-DVD is much higher resolution (1080p) and often has scenes with more than 4 times the bitrate of the maximum that Apple TV can handle.
Apple does provide some support for playing other file formats on Apple TV, through transcoding of course. The latest version of QuickTime Pro will let you export any video you can play in it to the exact format Apple TV needs. There are no settings for quality or resolution, there's just one option: Export to Apple TV. The export option simply transcodes your movie file from whatever format it's in to an Apple TV supported H.264 format. The problem is that even on a fast system, this is a time intensive process.
To put it into perspective, we transcoded a 702.1MB Xvid video (640 x 352) to the Apple TV format on a 3.0GHz Mac Pro. The entire process took 55 minutes at a rate of about 0.213MB/s. H.264 encoding performance, especially under QuickTime, isn't particularly fast even with four very fast cores at your disposal. To make matters worse, even if you happen to have the fastest Mac available today, QuickTime doesn't appear to take advantage of more than two cores.
In short, it takes a lot of time to transcode your content into something that's Apple TV friendly. If you decide that you want to watch an episode of House that you didn't buy from the iTunes Store on your TV you'll have to come back in about an hour before you can actually start watching it. We understand why Apple didn't offer support for alternative codecs (e.g. DivX) out of the box, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes the device less attractive to users.
How does Apple TV make watching movies and TV shows? For the most part it's as good of an experience as you'd expect. Once again we have a complaint about the way the interface deals with navigating up the menu tree while you're playing content. If you're playing a video and hit the menu button, perhaps to see what else you have available to watch, video playback stops completely. We'd prefer a Media Center-esque solution where we get a menu overlay on top of the video, or simply a smaller video window while we navigate through the menu. Again it's an argument of simplicity vs. functionality, and we know which side of the fence Apple is on. It may be better this way for the vast majority of the public; we just know how we'd rather have it.
Fast forwarding through video content is done very well: simply tap the forward button on the remote to skip ahead by a fixed interval and the player jumps ahead. There's very little lag before resuming playback and we didn't have any audio sync issues when going back and forth in a video.
The only other complaint we had was that there's no volume control on the Apple TV itself, so you'll unfortunately need to keep another remote around for that purpose.
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rexian96 - Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - link
The video in mini is very crippled though. At least this one has a 7300 chip which would help in H264 decoding. I'd say an XBOX 360 is a much better choice (price wise) if you have an MCE PC around, or nothing beats an HTPC.feraltoad - Thursday, March 29, 2007 - link
I didn't even think of that ninjit. You guys are both right. The Video does suck in the MacMini. -Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory(1)-I think this means no way in hell is Apple gonna up the MacMini to 7300 graphics cuz if they did it really would take tard to buy an apple TV over a macmini when ur alreayd willing to shell out 300. Looking at that the Apple TV looks really insane. And even that looks crazy if Microsoft puts in a HDDVD drive now that the 360 has HDMI. Also, PS3 really flubbed up IMO by not leveraging the media center xtnder aspect since it would be preferable to the MacMini to my mind for an entertainment machine considering the gaming and the BR drive since they are ~same price. I here PS3 can do media extending work, but I don't here much from anyone about it. This crap makes me mad. The only "convergence" I ever see are companies with what seem like kick-ass winning products that ultimately "converge" into the s#it hole. They need to just make an extender that only relays video and audio but digitally (and relays commands) for those who want cable free extension. Til then I'll have to stick to my "30 dollars worth of cables" as someone else suggested.
Novaoblivion - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
I just picked one up yesterday evening and have been enjoying it so far. I bought it after having heard that it has been hacked to play xvid files :D.Trisped - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
What is so great about the 7300 that it warrants the statement, "http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2952&a...">even with the help of the GeForce 7300." A 7300 doesn't rate high on the processing side no matter how I look at it. Now if it was a 7800 or 7900 or an ATI 1800 or 1900, or better yet a 8800, then yes I would say that the statement applied. I just don't see it for a 7300 GO GPU.Fast Forward is when you play the video back at an accelerated speed (1.5x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, etc). What is described http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2952&a...">here, "Fast forwarding through video content is done very well: simply tap the forward button on the remote to skip ahead by a fixed interval and the player jumps ahead"here is more of a skip ahead, since you are skipping some video to move forward, or ahead, in the video.
Trisped - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
Also, why was the review so tame? Normally Anandtech drills anything that isn't perfect, but this one was more of a "for your info" type review.We should we expect a compare contrast between the AppleTV and the XBox360?
rexian96 - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
Didn't see it mentioned, but I am assuming it supports MP4 container only to be compatible with iTune. In that case, no Dolby/DTS sound tracks. And since it doesn't have analog 5.1/7.1 output, I think it's safe to assume stereo is the best audio you can get? Hmmm, like someone said it's just an ipod with video out & no display.If these assumptions are right, I think it's safe to say that it's NOT targeted towards enthusiasts.
Questar - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
Of course it's not. This is targeted at the mass market.archcommus - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
Every review of a device like this just confirms my thoughts even more that if you want this kind of device behind your TV, you're better off just building an HTPC yourself and having a nice gigabit network throughout your home. Then you can have a server PC with hundreds of GB or even over a TB of storage for videos, music, photos, etc., and also with multiple HD tuner cards in it, and then all you need for each TV in your home is a cheap client PC with a good network connection and some old processor and like 40 GB HDD, that can then stream HD television, video, music, photos, YouTube, whatever the hell you want from the server.Sounds a lot better to me.
vision21 - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
Is not that the solution to lot of these problems? Laptops already have graphics cards that support 1080p resolution. I have seen VGA ports and DVI ports on laptops, but not HDMI or component cable outs. Instead of keeping AppleTV connected to HDTV, can't we connect laptop directly to HDTV? Am I missing something?abakshi - Monday, March 26, 2007 - link
A bunch of laptops now have HDMI outputs, such as the one I'm typing this on (HP dv9000t).But more importantly, that has the same issue as directly plugging in a desktop to your TV -- people don't do it - they want a simple, set-top box type of device, so that's where a Media Center Extender / Apple TV / X360 / etc. comes in.