It worked!...and very well indeed!

Question

It worked!...and very well indeed!

Equipment used:

Hardware-
Viewsonic N4060W
AppleTV (HDMI) 1080i setting
24" iMac
Maxtor Firewire drive

Software-
MacTheRipper 3.0 R14
Mediafork 0.8 0b1
iTunes
Casino Royale WS DVD

Used MacTheRipper to extract the movie from my DVD (only 3.0R14 will do it). 40mins
-This step is only mandatory for the "tough to crack" Sony DVDs.

Imported rip to MediaFork and encoded with these settings:
h.264 (Main)
(fps) -same as source
(Average bitrate) 5000kbs
-default for rest
(Audio) -default
50mins

Then imported Casino Royale WS.mp4 to iTunes. 2mins
Started up AppleTV, went to Movies, started Movie!

It took ~45sec for the movie to start (I think it was the Airport). As soon as I opened the Airport utility on the iMac, I noticed a 2.0MB stream transmiting from the iMac.

IMHO, the AppleTV is doing a fine job of upconverting. Any quality issues are going to be centered around the encoding rate. I'm going to do a few more test to see just how high of a bitrate i can make the file.

Now, all I need is the next MediaFork/HandBrake release...since it will support AAC5.1!

Totally Content...

PowerBook G4 Ti / 24" iMac 2.33, 2gb,500gb, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Mar 24, 2007 5:18 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 24, 2007 9:35 PM in response to Duwayne Caviness

UPDATE:

Tried a different bit rate and setting:

h.264 (Main)
(fps) -same as source
(Average Bitrate) 7000kbs
Anamorphic Output (853 x 354)

Added to iTunes Library and AppleTV played it without a hitch.

Better quality and fuller screen (i.e. greater coverage witout losing ratio).

Thus far, I'm not sure where the cap is.

Next Test: Encode rip with 100% Constant quality.

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Answer 2

Mar 24, 2007 9:52 PM in response to Duwayne Caviness

I just picked mine up today and I am extremely pleased with it...had some initial setup issues but after I restarted my network all was well..

So far I have tested the following:

an Episode of Farscape
an Episode of Afro Samurai

normal ITunes music library and photos...

Please, do NOT believe the hype about how "poor" the video quality is and as a side note I have VisualHub which allowed me to convert (In less than 20 min) 5 episodes of Farscape that were in .AVI....looks excellent..

Based on alot of peoples remarks about Apple TV i almost didnt get it...but am so glad I did, my wife even digs it...

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Answer 3

Mar 24, 2007 9:57 PM in response to IAMSCIENCE

Is VisualHub quicker? Hmm...Let me give it a try.

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Answer 4

Mar 24, 2007 10:02 PM in response to Duwayne Caviness

Yes, I am happy with Apple TV. It is nice to be able to see all of my photos on my 51" Hitachi HDTV without having to bother with burning them to DVD first. The streaming issue in regard to photos or rather lack of it bothersome and a pain in the rear end, but other than that I love it!

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Answer 5

Mar 26, 2007 11:26 AM in response to Duwayne Caviness

Duwayne,

Did you have any luck with the "constant 100%" test?

I've tried it a couple of times, but when I import it to iTunes I can only hear the sound. The screen is white.

I too wonder what is the "maximum" setting that can be applied to get video quality as close to as what you had in the DVD. What I've seen so far is that even at 5000kbs the image is overall much darker than the original DVD.

Thanks,
Julian

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