I was intrigued by the upgrades to Apple TV's offering, particularly the movie rentals which include HD offerings. Has anyone been using Apple TV on their CRT, and if so, is the quality as good as say a HTPC or stand-alone DVD/HDDVD player?

I don't have a Moome card but have a transcoder that allows me to play component through my Marquee 8500. For DVD I use a HTPC, and I've no outboard scaler. I'm tempted to try this Apple TV. Any impressions of the product from other forum members? Am I good-to-go with just the Apple TV through component on my Marquee

Thanks in advanace!
John.

I also am thinking of getting one, there not to expensive and i know there are hacks to turn it into basically a mac mini for a few hundred less!. And it be nice to view all your pics of family when you have them over. I know it does 1080i and if you do the hack it should do 1080p and i think it does 720p, my mac book shows 1080p as on option when connected to my lumagen.

Athanasios

Just found out that the apple tv will play its rented movies from the iTunes stor at 720p, not bad and the marquee looks great with 720p wich is actually a higer rez than 1080i which is the same as 560p.

Athanasios

Component should work just fine through your transcoder.

I'm going to get one now since they dropped the price, but I'd like it in the living room (for music and TV shows) as opposed to the HT. I'll probably try it and see how I like it in the HT first, maybe. Might have to get two.

SC

Have you seen this? http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSN1639580720080117

Not sure if other ISPs will follow...

I dunno. $230 or $330 for the privilege to rent HD movies for $4-5 apiece? Assuming your ISP doesn't whack you for higher fees? And movies expire 24hrs after you hit play.

It's a cool package, no doubt, but... it looks like a great way to vacuum $$ out of your pocket. Netflix seems like a much better deal, if not quite the wow factor.

Their demo is cute. It shows HD movies ready to play in about 2 seconds. They must have a faster net connection than I do....

I dunno. $230 or $330 for the privilege to rent HD movies for $4-5 apiece? Assuming your ISP doesn't whack you for higher fees? And movies expire 24hrs after you hit play.

It's a cool package, no doubt, but... it looks like a great way to vacuum $$ out of your pocket. Netflix seems like a much better deal, if not quite the wow factor.

Their demo is cute. It shows HD movies ready to play in about 2 seconds. They must have a faster net connection than I do....

That's when the new hauppauge capture card comes to the rescue.

...if you've got a good way to feed it, maybe. Can those things work with e.g. satellite?

I'd find them a lot more interesting if they had HDMI out. I don't want to watch movies on my computer. I suppose you could add an HDMI card to the PC but those are pretty pricey too. By the time you dedicate a computer with big disk, the capture card, the HDMI card, etc, the AppleTV starts to look less unreasonable.

Hell, I should probably ditch my satellite subscription and get one of these AppleTV boxes. The $60/mo sat subscription would pay for quite a few movies on the AppleTV.


EDIT: I thought some more about the logistics of downloading movies like this. A normal SD DVD movie is usually 4-6GB. A 720p HD movie is probably going to be, what, 15GB or so? I have a reasonably fast broadband connection, upwards of 2Mbps or so. If I download a movie at 200 kB/sec, it's going to take 75000 sec or 20.8 HOURS to download an HD movie. Ya ain't gonna be doing any impulse watching like that. Streaming doesn't work if it takes 10x longer to download than to view. Let's say they use some mondo compression algorithm to bring it down to only 2GB for an HD movie. It's still going to take 2.7 hours to download. And what kind of video quality will you have? The video codecs used in all formats of DVDs are *already* compressed. So how practical is this device for 99.9% of consumers today?

...if you've got a good way to feed it, maybe. Can those things work with e.g. satellite?

I'd find them a lot more interesting if they had HDMI out. I don't want to watch movies on my computer. I suppose you could add an HDMI card to the PC but those are pretty pricey too. By the time you dedicate a computer with big disk, the capture card, the HDMI card, etc, the AppleTV starts to look less unreasonable.

Hell, I should probably ditch my satellite subscription and get one of these AppleTV boxes. The $60/mo sat subscription would pay for quite a few movies on the AppleTV.

From what I've heard, it can record anything from component output. It cannot record from HDMI since signal passing thru it is encrypted. So in the future, DRM will eventually consider component output as illegal. LOL :D

And as for watching using computer, mine is connected to the projector. The output doesn't really look like a computer anymore. It's a dedicated htpc.

I dunno. $230 or $330 for the privilege to rent HD movies for $4-5 apiece? Assuming your ISP doesn't whack you for higher fees? And movies expire 24hrs after you hit play.

It's a cool package, no doubt, but... it looks like a great way to vacuum $$ out of your pocket. Netflix seems like a much better deal, if not quite the wow factor.

Their demo is cute. It shows HD movies ready to play in about 2 seconds. They must have a faster net connection than I do....

+1

The way I look at it, for $229 I'm getting a box that will connect to my iTunes collection to play music, show photo slideshows from .Mac or Flicker, play YouTube stuff (purely for entertainment), and play HD video podcasts (there's actually some cool free content out there, now).

So, I'm not paying the $229 to rent movies... I'm paying the $229 to get a box that does a lot of interesting things, but that ALSO plays rented movies.

As for the downloads, I don't see the big concern there, either. The movies can download overnight when I'm in bed sleeping. The SD stuff is 1.5 gigs or so - a non-issue. You can probably start watching that within a few minutes of starting the download. Even a large HD movie (probably 4-6 gigs, I'd guess - remember we're talking about h.264 w/aac here, not old MPEG-2) should easily download overnight on my so-so 1.5 Mbps DSL. No, I can't pick something out and start watching it in 5 minutes. On the other hand, I can pick something out one evening and watch it the next morning or the next evening. That certainly wouldn't work with Netflix. Plus, I've got 6 or 8 movies in my Netflix queue right now marked "short wait", "long wait" or "very long wait". Wanna bet on how long it'll be before I get any of those titles?

SC