Movies play in low resolution ... ?

Question

Level 1

19 points

Movies play in low resolution ... ?

Just got the ATV2, and set it up. Movies stored in iTunes on the iMac upstairs were listed and played just fine, but noticed that the resolution of the movie itself was very low. I started off playing some of the Pixar animation movies and saw noticeable compression in the graphics, color was off, etc. Even the kids asked, "why is the movie so fuzzy?" Almost as if the quality of the movie was significantly downgraded to optimize streaming over Wi-Fi.

Anyone else experience this?

MacBookPro4,1, Mac OS X (10.6.4), 4 GB RAM :: Purchasd circa May 2009

Posted on Oct 22, 2010 6:08 AM

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Answer 1

rz22g

Level 1

62 points

Oct 22, 2010 7:49 AM in response to _Bones_

Are the movies you referring to HD or SD ? If they are SD and you have always viewed them on the smaller screen of a computer then its expected that they will not look nearly as good played on a larger display.

You can always connect via ethernet cable and see if it improves but I do not think that itunes and ATV are set up to vary bitrate for playback.

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Answer 2

_Bones_ Author

Level 1

19 points

Oct 23, 2010 12:11 PM in response to rz22g

SD movies.

But, we have other non-HD movies on DVD, et al, and we don't see the same distortion. Looks and feels like you are watching a sequence of badly compressed JPEG files. Kind of a shame when I can rent Blue-Ray DVD's from RedBox for about the same cost or less. Yeah?

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Answer 3

dq46

Level 1

9 points

Oct 23, 2010 2:23 PM in response to _Bones_

Just received ATV2 and rented The Spy Next Door (in HD). I have to say I was very disappointed to see quite a few artifacts and excessive graininess. My LCD is full 1080p and relatively new so I know it ain't the TV. (I know the ATV2 is 720p). I have 8Mbit DSL - a quick sniff indicated movie was streaming at about 3Mbs - so not a b/w issue and indeed if I paused the movies I could see the buffered stream was quite far ahead compared where I was in the movie (if you get me).

Curiously when I previewed whats on In The Theaters - the promos were free of any noise / artifacts.

Hope this issue related to that particular rented title only. If other titles suffer same then ATV2 is going back.

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Answer 4

_Bones_ Author

Level 1

19 points

Oct 24, 2010 12:16 AM in response to dq46

Yes. Exactly. I also noticed that previews seemed to be less distorted. Glad to know its not just me.

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Answer 5

Oct 29, 2010 7:26 AM in response to _Bones_

Hi Bones

I think Apple is subjecting us as new ATV2 owners to 2 difference standards within one device.
1. "HTTP live streaming" for our content from itunes via home sharing
2. "Quicktime streaming server" for Apple's movie and TV rentals where Apple sends out the content using this technology.

I feel Apple is treating it's customer's as second class citizens where they have ripped their on content on to the Mac into iTunes and want to watch these on the new Apple TV.

I'm not expert - please correct me if i'm wrong.

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