More AppleTV Stuff

Mike Curtis has a new blog AppleTV Hacker with loads of good insights and info.

AppleTV already being hacked.
Put in a bigger hard drive.
Add Xvid support (I assume this also means Divx).
Basically the AppleTV is running OSX so if you can get inside the box then you can install support for other video codecs.

BusinessWeek points out some problems with content and AppleTV in this article:
Apple's TV Blurry Future

I generally agree with BusinessWeek. If Apple wants this to be as successful as the iPod, they have to provide good video content that people are willing to pay for. With music you could easily rip CD's that you bought, and put your music on your iPod. But that isn't the case with movies. The movie studios don't want you ripping their DVD's to your hard drive and from there to your AppleTV, and they try to stop you from doing that. So I think Apple really has to work to get more movies on the iTunes store, eventually at HD quality, to make this a success. It seems that Apple did a great job with the design of the product, hardware, and interface, but the content is still a big question.

I played around with a demo unit in the Apple Store. It was hooked up to a Sony 32" LCD screen. The iTunes TV shows and movies did look soft. So far no HD content on the iTunes store and they call their movies "near DVD quality." Apple seems to limit their content to 640 pixels wide. For your iTunes movies that means the resolution of the source is only 25% of a 1280 by 720 resolution screen. So a pretty big scale up to fill the screen. I looked at some of their clips in the Apple Store and I found that I had to stand back over 15 ft. from the screen before I wasn't annoyed by the softness of the image and some of the compression artifacts. That's pretty normal living room conditions, but if your TV is bigger then you will be seeing more of the iTunes imperfections on your HD screen at the same distance.

The unit will play back 720p movies at 24fps and 960x540 at 30 fps. For encoding your own stuff and podcasts, you could use those resolutions. But for Apple, who is clearly marketing this at HDTV owners, you think they would make their own content more attractive, especially considering that those movies cost from $10-$15 a pop. It is not even meant to run on a 4x3 standard-def TV (like I have) where that iTunes Store content actually looks good. Obviously Apple has some obstacles to providing HD content--namely the movie studios and issue of big downloads on the internet.

This points out another issue, which is that standard-def rarely looks good on a high-def display. Especially normal TV, 4x3 and interlaced, it will always look crummy on a big, widescreen, and progressive display. Americans are clearly giving up on 4x3, interlaced TV's. So it will be interesting to see when broadcast TV decides to switch to widescreen and/or progressive broadcasts.