Apple TV owners' thread. - Page 4

Netflix does NOT do 5.1 anywhere yet.

Not on ps3 or roku or wdtv live.

They are working on it but it is not available yet, unless you are a beta tester.

The new apple tv has the best implementation and picture quality of netflix I have ever had in my house. It is by far the coolest user interface.

Does any else see the same issue quite often when I go to view a movie stored on my Time Capsule the Apple TV quits working and I lose its signal on the TV. If I keep pressing menu eventually I get somewhere so it's not locked up. I think it might only happen when the Time Capsule is asleep and it doesn't wake up fast enough...

Thanks srauly.
I haven't given an iTunes streamed movie a chance yet. It the monthly-bandwidth-limited great white north, you've got to be frugal with your film choices.

That's funny, I'm watching "Dark City" in 5.1 right now from the PS3. I'm even given the choice to choose an alternative audio track in just stereo.

There aren't a lot movies with 5.1 available, but they're there.

As far as the aTV's Netflix interface goes, unless I'm missing something, I don't find it any more cool than the PS3's, or even the ipad's UI. Frankly, the PS3's UI is more complete, clearly showing whether your current selection is available in HD, and whether 5.1 audio is available for it.

The picture quality from the aTV seems a bit better. My PS3 struggles with my wireless router and doesn't seem to be able to take advantage of the the entire available bandwidth - so the picture quality suffers. No such problem with the aTV.

Apparently the canadian netflix has movie choices and audio tracks we in the states do not have yet.

I tried playing a high profile 3.1 720p file on my ATV 1G, and it froze the unit and I had to reboot. It wasn't an issue of bit rates but there must be something in such files that the video driver doesn't deal with. Remember Apple only supports main profile on both the 1G and 2G ATV. I played the same file on my iPad and it worked perfectly. So, it's clear that the iPad and hence ATV 2G can handle much higher video specs than they support. The playing on both was via the Apple video player and not VLC or anything else.

If I use EyeTV HD to encode with their iPad settings then I get something that plays on both the iPad and ATV 1G.

My ATV 2G should be here any day and I guess at that point I will find out exactly what the limits are.

Philip

Heh ... now if only they had the video to go along with the audio choice

Philip

I concur with your assessment. I can watch Netlfix on my Tivo S3, PS3 or Apple TV and ATV wins. Netflix video on the Tivo looks a bit soft and the PS3 is a little better. The ATV seems to have better detail and color. ATV appears to get the most out of SD content than the PS3 or Tivo.

I dont like how in the Netflix UI there is no indication if the content is HD or not. Xbox 360 does a better job in it's Netflix integration.

Not sure about the TiVo but the PS3 doesn't upscale Netflix SD content so you are really comparing it to your TV's scaler. It would be interesting to compare it to one of the streamers (WDTV Live Plus) or one of the Blu-ray players (Samsung BD-C6900) that do a nice job scaling all the way up to 1080p. Of course the Apple TV is only scaling SD to 720p and again your display it doing the rest.

What's your download speed? From my experience 6 Mbps is the bare minimum for streaming. If you have anything less Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, Roku, Apple TV or whatever they all going to suck.

Actually I have a problem with the way PS3 handles anamorphic SD content on Netflix. It seems to crop the top and bottom. I've never really took the time to figure it out. Anyway I have the Tivo and PS3 set to not scale as I prefer to have my processor handle it. Even though Apple TV cannot output native rate, the image looks better in my eye.

Most people do not have faster download speeds than 5mbps and that's not even reliable as it varies with traffic. A streaming service that requires even faster speeds is going to reach no one. The terms HD and SD are being thrown around pretty loosely. It seems to me that any streaming service providing DVD quality for video in stereo sound is good enough at this point. That means 480p in the proper aspect ratio. When Apple says SD what do they mean? If they mean widescreen at 480i then that's good enough. The high specs for the video and audio the worse the reception unless they buffer it properly. 1080p with high quality sound is going to run through data limitations (which most providers have in Canada at least) really fast. Streaming anything close to Blu-Ray is a pipe-dream.

That chart comparing the atv, bb and roku HD seems inaccurate. Odd that it doesn't mention mkv for the Boxee Box. That surely is a typo?

The iPad, ATV 2G and ATV 1G all seem to have this main profile 3.1 720p limitation spec. The newer products support 30fps as opposed to 24fps. In fact, the newer one's are more capable than this but, like the Xbox, won't put the files on the devices if they are labelled high profile 5.1 for example. You then have to go into the file and manually change the profile label and the file plays. I suspect Apple is being really conservative in what they will support, compared to what the devices will play. Has anyone confirmed this to be the case with the ATV2G?

Philip

Edit: The chart I referred to is in the Boxee Box thread.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that chart was made by someone with some extra time on their hands, and not by Boxee.

"Streamloaded"... I like that.

Heh ... well it's getting hard to know just what is real. There seems to be so much hype being thrown around for all the media players that you'd think there was such a surplus of quality content.

ATV, BB, Google TV, etc ... I feel in a free fall ...

Philip

I don't believe Netflix streams at >3Mb/sec very often if at all. The notion that you need 5Mb/sec is not accurate. And while people on cable get speed tests showing their "super high bandwidth", most cable connections probably don't even average 5Mb/sec over a sustained period. DSL on average will stay closer to your "speed test" rating over time, with, obviously, lower rated speed most often.

My DSL gives me ~5Mb/sec -- sustained -- and not only has no problem with Netflix, it seems fully capable of handling OnLive.

That 5Mb/s assumes nothing else is happening on your internal network. I never got 5 mb/s when I had 5 mb/s adsl. I now have 25 mb/s adsl and I get 22 mb/s, but even that is not something I would trust for HDTV ( although my provider does stuff TV via that fibe connection, as they call it). The thing about sat/cable, or even OTA, is you turn on the TV and switch to a channel and it just works. The negative side to that is that one seems to be paying mainly to see ads, and that would seem to be the wave of net based services if google has its way.

In any case, there are enough people complaining about their broadband speeds that I doubt the 3 mb/s connections would hold up under massive usage. Despite what the adsl people say, the service is affected by numbers.

Philip

That hasn't been my experience but there are so many things that can affect network performance. It will vary between ISPs. I had switched from AT&T 6 Mbps DSL to Comcast 12 Mbps. On AT&T the actual download speed was really 5 Mbps. That's enough stream SD smoothly with very few dropouts. It was borderline for HD streaming. On the Tivo S3 you can see the bitrate and Netflix HD was about 4.5 Mbps on average. I'd have to wait on buffering more than I'd like.

"That 5Mb/s assumes nothing else is happening on your internal network."

Again, I get that ... sustained... Yes, if I'm downloading something, I get less available for streaming, but my "from the world" speed is consistently 5 megabits/second.

A test I just ran (this seems to be a good speed test because it seems to be downloading a large file, whereas some speed tests only take about 10 seconds which I don't think is long enough to accurately determine your speed) indicated that I'm getting about 14.3 Mbps down and 5.6 Mbs up. When I ran this test about a week ago, I got similar results. But yesterday evening (around 6:30pm) I was only getting about 3.5 Mbps down. My wife was home and VPN'd into work, and I'm sure that many other people were also home from work using their internet service, but regardless of the reasons, it concerns me about whether this new paradigm of streaming content over the internet is workable. If even I (with what would be considered a really fast internet connection) can drop down so low, I'm sure that others who are starting out with about 4 Mbps on a good day aren't going to have much leeway.

And what if you have multiple rooms in your house? If you're single and you're only worrying about one TV at a time, then great. But if you've got a family of four, and you're all trying to watch something different on Netflix, get ready for some really crappy PQ. Whereas with cable TV, it doesn't matter if we're all watching a different channel.

Which is why, with a family of say 4 or 5, it's even more important to have fast reliable internet speeds like what FiOS offers. The more family members using content online concurrently, the faster internet speeds you need. One of my friends ran into this problem with 5 people in his family and with Comcast. Which is why i recommended he switch to the FiOS 35/35 internet service. And after he did his problems went away. Unlike when he had comcast, the speeds are consistently fast and all his family members can typically be online without any problems.

Just curious if anyone else has tried to throw any 1080p bd rips (x-coded with handbrake) at this thing and what the results were.. Someone else in this thread had and got jutters but I think he was on wifi? If I can get confirmation that they'll play smoothly w/ core audio I'll be getting one of these things (prob will anyways just for fun)..