The Apple TV (2010) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 4, 2010 12:07 AM ESTTrue Limits & The App Factor
The original Apple TV had the same limitations as the new one and it didn’t have Netflix support. What made it interesting however was that you could hack the box relatively easily and get it to play anything you wanted, it was a capable Pentium M based PC after all. The move to H.264 crippled the original Apple TV (although you could breathe more life into it with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder card). Its life was cut short in a way similar to what original Xbox owners saw with XBMC once higher quality DivX rips became the norm.
The new Apple TV doesn’t exactly have hardware specs to write home about. It’s A4 based and presumably doesn’t have any more memory bandwidth than the standard A4 you find in an iPad or iPhone.
Zotac ION mini-ITX motherboard (left) vs. Apple TV motherboard (right)
Apple imposes basic limits on what you can play on the Apple TV. H.264, main profile (or lower) and 720p. In practice you can stream 1080p content to the device just fine, it gets downscaled for display of course. I bombarded the Apple TV with a bunch of files that it doesn’t officially support to get an idea of what it can do once hacked.
Bitstreaming Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS shouldn’t be a problem, provided you don’t exceed any bandwidth limitations on the device itself.
The first test in our media streaming suite is a simple high profile (L4.1) m2ts file from a Blu-ray disc. The 1080p 24 fps video ranges between 3 - 14Mbps and it actually played perfectly on the Apple TV. There were no dropped frames and no stuttering.
Other high profile samples didn’t work as well. The bird series from Planet Earth almost all played, but there were serious stuttering issues. It almost seemed like the foreground played smoothly while the background jerked through the scene.
Most bitrates played (with stutter) although at 70Mbps or above the video player would often either crash or the entire Apple TV would reboot.
I believe that if the new Apple TV were hacked to support AC3/DTS passthrough, a good majority of 1080p and 720p H.264 content could be streamed and played by the device. I am concerned by the stuttering issues I noticed on some of the content I threw at the device, but I’m guessing we’ll know soon enough the true limits of the new Apple TV.
Again, it’s worth pointing out that while you’ll have to hack the Apple TV to eventually support all file formats there are many other competing devices that play them natively. None of them have the sleek form factor of the Apple TV, but they also don’t need hacking to work.
The only real advantage a hacked second generation Apple TV would have is the ability to run iOS apps. I suspect that the most useful ones would either use the iPod/iPhone as a controller or be very simple and designed to use the Apple remote. The Apple TV has a lot of potential as a casual gaming box. All Apple would need to do is introduce a gamepad of some sort, open up the Apple TV SDK and get iOS game developers to start porting titles over. We’d obviously have to see an increase in game quality/depth compared to what’s in the App Store today but there’s potential here.
I believe this may be Apple’s road to console gaming. In a few years we’ll have the power of an Xbox 360 in an iPhone. The Apple TV at that point would basically be a legacy console. All Apple needs to do in the interim is court the right game developers.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Thanks for the correction, fixed :)cjs150 - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
And it will look like the Apple TV.What a simple concept, small box, very limited backplate. Lets think about it how about a box that had the following connectors
1. Ethernet connection (but a bit faster)
2. HDMI connection
3. Audio out (personally would not bother and take through HDMI)
4. USB
5. Wifi (optional for me because house if wired)
Add in 2 Gb of memory a small SSD for OS + limited applications
Plays movies, TV, music. Can surf web and basically that is it.
Would need some sort of wireless connection to allow remote control and to attach a keyboard (if only to type web addresses).
Apple have got the size of the box about right. Even a mini-itx board has too many features that would not be needed for the ideal straming box.
Apple has given me a glimpse of the future - it looks like Apple TV but it will be something else
tipoo - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Is that a typo, or can it really go that high? Apple's official specs list MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps and Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps.Docchris - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
he was specifically testing non-apple videos to ty and break it, so what apples specs state doesn't really matter.i was just curious where he got a video form which exceeds the blu-ray specification
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showthread.php?t...I remuxed the files as .mov without re-encoding and sent them over to the Apple TV. Even if I re-encoded down to 10Mbps there was still some slight stuttering so there's something unusually stressful about these samples. At 70Mbps or above the Apple TV would start behaving very strange, the video player app would either crash or the unit would reboot before finishing playback.
Take care,
Anand
tech6 - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
While the cable and content oligopoly are terrified of IP based home entertainment, no legitimate solution will truly replace cable. Cable is simply too good of a revenue stream not to protect by these companies. Once they have "cabel-ized" the Internet through the defeat of net neutrality and can restrict and monitor users Internet activities then I'm sure we will see a lot more IP TV but at the expense of any freedom or anonymity that we may have ever had on the Internet.mfenn - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Perfect response! XDvol7ron - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
"You can argue that it’s for firmware updates but there’s also WiFi/Ethernet for that."Isn't WiFi firmware update for anything considered bad practice? Or have people turned the other cheek on this?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Technically as long as the firmware package can download over WiFi and execute once completely downloaded it should be ok. I agree USB seems like the safer bet though, particularly if there's a firmware update that fixes a network issue.Take care,
Anand
naho - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
"Unlike a smartphone it eats a good amount of power at idle - a whole 1.8W. I don’t think Apple even bothered to enable serious power management on the A4 in the Apple TV, it’s just not necessary."What would power management reducing idle power to 0.8 W have saved customers?
Eg. if 5 million units are sold of this model x 22 hours idle per day x average product lifetime 4 years x 365 days/year x 0.12$/kWh (maybe less in US, more Europe) = 160.6 GWh x 0.12$/kWh = 19.27 million dollars in additional electricity bills.