Apple TV (take 2), take two
By Ryan Block 
posted February 12th 2008 4:12PM
posted February 12th 2008 4:12PM
- The update itself is under 200MB and took us under five minutes to download, but over ten minutes to install. Our first try failed out. Also, get used to seeing that loading bar screen, it cycled through about five times for us.
- Yep, that's a slick new video that it opens with.
- Did someone say 1080p output? Oh yes, it's finally enabled!
- Yep, it's officially software version 2.0.
- Although manually inputting your Apple ID with the remote is a pain, renting movies is absolutely a snap.
- Our HD movie was ready for playback within a minute of starting the download. Very nice.
- Picture quality is pretty good. Not amazing, but pretty good.
- Flickr integration works well (unlike on stage at Macworld), but there's no way to aggregate your contact lists's photos to your ATV. It's on a single contact basis only, meaning you can only look at your own or any one other user's photos at a time. Kind of a bummer in that regard.
- Plenty more details to be found here and here, as well as an informative chart of how downloads works here.
Im talking about the interface. Im on Leopard, but the Front Row's interface is different from the promos im seeing of ATV.
How much did you go over on your Time Warner CAP after watching 1 HD movie? The rental is $5, but the bandwidth over usage is another $5.
would anyone happen to know if OS X can still be installed on a Apple Tv when it has Take 2 on it?
Not yet man, this stuff takes time. Check out the familiar mac sites (including engadgets sister, www.tuaw.com for updated info when it comes... awkwardtv.com / .net works as well.)
Did the update (have 3 apple TV's). So far I am NOT impressed, even though I am not going to use it would have been nice if the Canadian users would be able to rent movies as well.
Over all still loving the ATV with 902 movies you can go wrong....
I don't understand how Ryan was able to get his HD movie watchable "within a minute."
I rented a HD movie at 8:00 and and was hoping I would be able to watch it tonight Unfortunately after around 25 minutes it was still not ready after reaching 11% downloaded. Booo!
Either this is server overload on a heavy night of the release, or they need to adjust the buffer.
It's probably your ISP or a bottleneck in routing somewhere. The update took about a minute to download for me and I was able to start watching Night Watch (HD) about a minute after I rented when at 2%
The only difficult decision is if it's worth getting rid of my 1.2(Safe) FW I have installed.. and my various programs... Like NitoTV... that allow me to rip movies to an external and stream them wirelessly to my aTV...
Even if you are getting 1080p, make no mistake about it, you are not getting anything close to HD with AppleTV. The bitrate is nowhere near what you get on a Blu-ray or HDVD disc. All of these movie download services need to stop calling it HD, because none of them are delivering anything close to what the disc formats are pulling.
What's the deal with hard drive space now? We have 2 computers to stream from. Should we get the 160gb or is the 40gb enough? The computers are a few years old and don't have the older wireless capabilities.
Crap, now I can't sync AND stream from the same computer. Has anyone else noticed that after the update?
@ dmklass
You can sync and stream from the same computer. Now, the Apple TV now seems to automatically recognize if your synced computer is on and iTunes is open, rather than you having to go into the "Sources" menu to choose that computer. As per usual, turning off your computer will give you only the synced items, turning it back on will allow you to stream content.
If you're synced computer is on and none of your content is showing (meaning, none of the content you want to stream), make sure that whatever you want to stream is checked in iTunes. Prior version would stream both checked and unchecked content, no matter the TV or Movie settings for your Apple TV on iTunes. But in Take 2 I couldn't get my TV Shows or Movies to show up to stream unless they were checked.
I'm very pleased to find that I can now stream internet radio after applying this update by creating playlists with the stream URLs. I had heard about this trick with the old firmware but it never worked for me.
Oddly, I find that I'm not offered 1080p in the list of resolutions even though my Westinghouse LVM-42w2 claims (a lot) to be 1080p and I have the ATV directly connected to the panel via HDMI. Gee, could this be YET ANOTHER HDMI handshaking problem? I mean, that would be unprecedented.
Even though your TV is a 1080p capable TV it doesn't mean the HDMI port you're hooking your AppleTV into is. If you have more than one HDMI port chances are you've chosen the wrong one. Many TV manufacturers only put one or two capable inputs on their displays. Read your manual.
After a quick glance it seems your TV supports 1080p through DVI and Component video. Since it has 2 you should consult your manual to find out which one supports the signal, or purchase an HDMI to DVI adapter so you can take advantage of the 1080p.
Wow, good catch, thanks. I never would have guessed that the HDMI input would be 1080i-only. However, on checking the fine print in the back of the manual it does appear that the only connector to support 1080p is DVI1.
This attempt after iphone is worth the try.
Wow, the max bitrate for H.264 video is 5 mbps.
I'm watching Sunshine on BluRay right now and the bitrate in the slowest spots is 17mbps. It hovers around 22mbps, and peaks at about 34mbps. And this disc is also using H.264 (AVC).
Even considering that this disc is 1080p instead of 720p and thus has twice the spatial resolution, the content on AppleTV's max bitrate measured per pixel pushed is still half of the minimum bitrate I see on BluRay and one quarter of the max I see on BluRay.
"Even considering that this disc is 1080p instead of 720p and thus has twice the spatial resolution, the content on AppleTV's max bitrate measured per pixel pushed is still half of the minimum bitrate I see on BluRay and one quarter of the max I see on BluRay."
You have to remember that the bit rate on the disc has to include all the audio options and subtitles - a HD disk works like a CD in that it encodes the whole enchilada into a single stream. If you strip out lossless audio and a couple of 5.1 alternate language tracks, the effective bit rate is much less than what you're seeing.
When you say CD, I guess you mean DVD.
And I don't think this figure includes audio bandwidth, especially formats I'm not hearing and my amp can't even reproduce. I say this mostly because the audio bitrate is listed separately next to the video bitrate.
Given that BluRays actual max bitrate during playback is 48mbit (oddly, the minimum speed for a BluRay drive is 1.5X, not 1X), I don't think it's ridiculous to say that when I see 34mbit up there it doesn't mean the video is at 34mbit (the max video bitrate alone for BluRay is listed at 40mbit).
If only MediaPortal could get their interface half as polished and stable as this.
Sigh.
I am just glad they have finally added airport. This was an unexpected addition. I can now get that airport express out of the wall!
It still doesn't compare to Windows Media Center, but having competition is great. It's going to force MS to expand more on their WMC platform.
Nice stuff Apple.
Anyone know how I can take advantage of playing back my own movies/videos with 5.1?
to Vanillacide from GOWEN
I think you have a number of things mixed up. I have worked in the efx side of TV/film for 25 years and I have not come across your version of this ever. Here is a link to the Quantel digital fact book. http://www.quantel.com/site/en.nsf/html/library_dfb
It explains all of the ways that tv formats work. Quickly, 3:2 pull down is what is applied to film shot at 24 - the traditional frame rate for film production - frames a second to make it into video for TV which in America runs at 30fps. It involves a mixture of 'clean' frames and additional frames made out of a field from the previous frame and a field from the following frame. The result is every film based second that ends up on SD tv has 6 frames which are 'made up' and can be a little soft and, worst case, even be a mixture of two scenes.
I think you both (Vanillacide and Gowen) are right... Vanillacide said "3:2 sequence converts 24 frames per second into 60." which is correct but could be clearer if he said "60 fields per second" because his sentence structure implies "frames per second" which is not correct. And Gowen is right because during display the TV de-interlaces the video from its 60 fields per second back to its 30 frames per second. So the 3:2 conversion does convert 24 frame/sec video to 30 frame/sec video which is also 60 field/sec video.
My AppleTV, set to 1080p, plugged by HDMI into a 1080p TV, does indeed output a 1080p signal. However, unlike the Playstation 3 sitting right next to it also plugged into the same 1080p TV by HDMI, the menus DO NOT look like they are 1080p. The Playstation 3 is sharp, 1:1 pixel mapping, truly amazing. The AppleTV really does look like the menus are actually more like 720p being upscaled to 1080p.
Logically, if it can physically output 1080p (confirmed by the TV @ 60hz), and upscale to 1080p, and if the scaling is not done by hardware AFTER the rendering stage, then nothing theoretically prevents Apple from making the menus true 1080p. But I have a feeling, from what my eyes can see, that the menus are NOT 1080p.
Just my two cents.
The following was found at the AwkwardTV Wiki site and implies that 1080p is upconversion in the output hardware, not native 1080p. This would matter specifically for photos being displayed meaning that your photos are rendered at 1280x720 by the AppleTV and then upconverted by the AppleTV to 1920x1080. This upconversion could have been done by your TV as well and who knows which would look better.
Here's AwkwardTV Wiki quoting AppleInsider:
"The update actually includes three software upgrades:
* An EFI firmware update.
* A firmware update for the Apple TV's HDMI video hardware that enables 1080p output through upconversion.
* The new Take Two menus and interface with support for HD downloads, rentals, AirTunes and more."
Just to clear up what people are saying about 1080p output, because I don't see the actual answer in here:
The AppleTV's maximum output resolution, even under v2, is 1280x800. This is a hardware maximum and no amount of software updates are going to change it. This applies to pictures, videos, whatever - you are not going above that. What this update has done is turned on HDMI's ability to output 1080p. In other words, the AppleTV will do 1080p upscaling. Whether this matters at all, I don't know (the only review I read which referenced this said that it did not).
watching Diggnation High Def
using the HDMI connector,
if you switch the Apple TV video output
to 1080 the Revision3 logo gets cut in half....
the image/picture doesn't fit on the screen of my
Samsung DLP. if I go to 720 instead the image still looks
good and it fits "right" and Revision3 in the
bottom right corner is not cut off/cropped.
wierdness.....
I like what they've done for podcasts,
don't like how the photos are handled now.
movie rentals are great, the HD ones are pretty good
even though they're just at 720 I don't mind at all
for the convenience and cost.
am I the only one that wishes the remote was programable
so I could control the volume of my tv set? so the +/-
would adjust volume.... that'd be super..... when I'm watching
a podcast and wanna bump up the volume I instinctively go