Star Trek on the Apple TV

Some very good points here.

Unfortunately for us Canadians, as mentioned in my previous post bluray is really the only high-quality HD option available for movie purchase (currently, anyway). I would much prefer to purchase HD films on Apple TV, but until that time bluray it is.

But as you said - given the choice, the difference can be negligible between 720 and 1080.

well i'll concede that i haven't cared to learn about bitrate and datarate, but given what's advertised to the general consumer, resolution such as 720p, 1080i and 1080p, that is the spec that most viewers like myself zero in on...i don't care to learn why my appletv hd movie isn't as sharp as my blu-ray movie, just fix it if you want me to choose appletv's convenience over blu-ray's quality... my experience so far is apple HD rentals are quite noticeably inferior to blu-ray or directv 1080i and 1080p rentals (albeit, when shown on a large HDTV)...unless the quality matches those other options i will only rent apple movies when i can't from the other sources..

Message was edited by: airguitar

btw..why did the youtube video i mentioned look so good on appletv on a big sceen?? it looked nearly as good as a blu-ray....almost!

Having grown up in the era of B&W, VHF/UHF, Rabbit-ears, and "snow", the difference between 1080p and 720p isn't a concern. But what IS a concern is that when I stream this movie from my shared iTunes library, it stutters. When I sync it and play directly from AppleTV, it does not. I don't believe it's a datarate problem; I am seeing 4MB/sec throughput which is more than enough to keep up and build a buffer. It doesn't matter how crystal-clear the picture is, if you start throwing away frames! No more HD purchases for me until this problem is addressed. The slight increase in resolution is not worth performance problems, especially at a premium price.

airguitar wrote:
btw..why did the youtube video i mentioned look so good on appletv on a big sceen?? it looked nearly as good as a blu-ray....almost!

placebo affect?

there is 0 chance of any youtube video getting anywhere near what blu-ray can do.
and if there was, you'd need a stupid amount of internet bandwidth to view it.

the point is, i could make a 1080p video that was 100kb/s bitrate. it'll look unwatchable.
1080p doesn't give you all the info required to know what the quality will be like.

1080p is a marketing term designed to trick customers into buying what they think they need.

JOHN ALBERGO wrote:
Having grown up in the era of B&W, VHF/UHF, Rabbit-ears, and "snow", the difference between 1080p and 720p isn't a concern. But what IS a concern is that when I stream this movie from my shared iTunes library, it stutters. When I sync it and play directly from AppleTV, it does not. I don't believe it's a datarate problem; I am seeing 4MB/sec throughput which is more than enough to keep up and build a buffer. It doesn't matter how crystal-clear the picture is, if you start throwing away frames! No more HD purchases for me until this problem is addressed. The slight increase in resolution is not worth performance problems, especially at a premium price.

that's clearly a networking issue you have there. i suspect you are using wifi ?
not much apple can do to fix your internal networking issues.

No, it's not a networking issue. I look at the data transfer at the base station itself, and it was sustaining 4 Megabytes per second, as I said. Very good signal and connection. There was no problem of dropped packets, retransmits, or the like. 4 MB/s is well beyond the speed of the movie. In fact, once ATV seemed satisfied with its buffer, the data rate dropped down significantly, and that is where the stuttering stopped and the movie played normally.

I've just re-tested, in light of some posts I've seen that recommend dropping the video resolution down to 720p, and... now there is no stuttering. This is just as well, since the movie itself is 720p, I'm fine with letting the TV do the work of up-rating instead of AppleTV.

It seems to me that the AppleTV couldn't keep up with the combination of tasks
- playing and uprating HD, protected content
- accepting a high incoming data rate

, and lowering to 720p relieved some of the burden. Wireless data rate profiles were the same in both circumstances, as you'd expect.

Now, I don't have proof of my theory of a workload problem, but I definitely have proof that there is not a networking problem. And, even if there were, the appropriate action for AppleTV would be to pause and re-buffer -- not dropping random frames.

most blind people i would assume ???

I didn't make that up. Perceptual differences between formats have actually been studied. Many people can barely perceive the difference between standard DVDs and HD video, much less between different HD resolutions. I think the debate over 720p vs. 1080p is more academic than practical. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of the hardware settings, the quality of the video from one to the next varies widely.