dciallella wrote:
Thank you AC that was most helpful. I will definitely continue buying digital movies from iTunes then and won't worry about the disc!
To recap, Blu Ray will still give you the ultimate quality currently, HD downloads from Apple are 720p not 1080p - this is partly AppleTV hardware limitation, but also a practical consideration as many people don't have blazing broadband speeds - still takes me 12 hours or so on a 1Mbps connection to download a HD movie rental, if I was trying to get the Blu Ray equivalent it would take days!
I find Apple TV to be an awesome gadget especially for playing music through my surround sound on TV instead of having to plug it into speakers for parties.
Music playback is why I got mine first, and I still think it's worth it for that alone, though with cheaper media players appearing left right and centre AppleTv starts to look comparatively expensive.
Remember AppleTV can also playback video you suitably encode for yourself eg home camcorder footage or perhaps off-air recordings from some PVRs.
Personally I tend to rent more movies from iTunes Store than buy but that's because in UK we can only currently buy SD movies but can rent HD.
itunes SD quality is sometimes near DVD quality but can be a lot worse (often for music videos and TV Shows I find) and I will frequently still buy DVDs, as much as I hate physical discs, because they're often much cheaper from the likes of Amazon than the downloads.
The problem with SD downloads from iTunes is that they need to play on iPods/iPhones too.
I've bought a couple of Blu Rays - usually because they have digital copies included and are good value overall especially if they contain the DVD too, but watching on teh PS3 is a real chore.
The hard thing to know is what's going to win out online in a few years and what formats there'll be playing on what devices then. May be iTunes formats, may be someone else, no one knows or can accurately predict.
