Review: Apple's second-generation Apple TV (2010) - Page 2

Heck, I've been asking "what's next" since Gen1 of this device and now I'm still asking the same question. My guess is that Gen3 will be the big one, or an iOS update for ATV next year.

I think this discrepancy in the rating basically boils down to (possibly) whomever wrote this review, did not look back to compare with the previous reviews. Otherwise you would have probably seen a revision of the old ratings or an adjustment with the caveat that the new rating took into account the way over-inflated numbers for the previous versions.

I would like to hear more about this feature.
With Netflix instant viewing (well, and iTunes for that matter) does anyone out there know if you can watch movies/videos with commentary tracks and special feature discs? Audio options?

This for me is the only real disappointment after "upgrading" to ATV 2. Since we stream to a lot of music to my entertainment system we've grown accustom to Apple TV's screensaver randomly going through our rather large iPhoto library. The new one is falls flat on it's face here and is a sore spot with my new purchase.

Your review mentions that the picture looks great but then complains about the 720p instead of 1080p. These figures are vast simplifications of what is going on the screen. Each pixel must be supplied with both color and density information, and huge compression of data can take place here. Bit depth and bit rate are important ways of measuring this, and should be taken into consideration in evaluating quality. Cable services are notorious for vastly compressing density and color information in order to get as many channels as possible and still claim 'HD' quality.
It would be very easy to create a 720p image with beautiful depth and color that would humiliate a 1080p image with less depth and color information. The key in all video transmission and coding is to create the most beautiful image with a given bit rate, and Apple may well have chosen a more pleasing balance than you are giving them credit for.
I have not seen the image on the Apple TV, but please do not discount it on the basis of one simple and possibly misleading statistic.

I am a professional cinematographer and i do have some expertise in this area.


Steve

Since Apple has been selling/renting 720p videos for a while now, people have history on their side when it comes to making these claims. The 720p videos that I have got from Apple range from 1.6Mbps to around 4.6Mbps. The other high def rental system available to me has 1080p images going around 20+Mbps

Which begs the question: How can the new Apple TV be integrated with Eye TV?

• We refuse to pay $100 a month for cable/satellite dish. We have a DSL connection only.

• My wife wants to watch streaming video on her Mac with Netflix.

• We also would like to record TV shows, possibly even burn those shows/movies to DVD. Most of her shows are on free TV anyway. Anything else that she wants to watch would be supplemented through Netflix streaming or DVDs mailed to us.

Which EYE TV products would work best?

Ahh, appletv...

what a waste of space

Not worthy of its own bar along the top of www.apple.co.nz


US Store
HD movie and TV show rentals
Netflix and YouTube streaming
iTunes music and photos from your computer
802.11n Wi-Fi
Apple Remote
Ships: 1-2 weeks
Free Shipping
$99.00


NZ store
Film rentals
YouTube streaming
iTunes music and photos from your computer
802.11n Wi-Fi
Apple Remote
Estimated Ship: 1-2 weeks
Free Shipping
NZ$ 170.00



Yeah go for it apple... movie rentals and youtube, for only 170$

thats gonna be a win

That's funny, as I just went onto the US iTunes Store, and it has on the main page "Now Available to Rent Iron Man 2".

1) If it ever gets the services it needs to be a real contender for the living room then we’ll see a place at the top next to their other legs, but until then it should feel lucky if even makes it to the front page of their site.

2) I’m not sure what you want Apple to do. Lose money on the device because content owners have legal, financial, moral or some silly reason why they don’t want to make money outside the US and other select countries? They can’t just add Netflix and TV Shows from iTunes because they do in the US. If they didn’t offer it for sale I’m sure New Zealanders would be complaining that Apple won’t even sell it to you and how wrong that is of them.

Copy protection is very important to content providers. The reason people generally want hard drive support and certainly codec support it to allow for playback of downloaded divx, xvid, mkv movies. With Apple removing any possibility of this happening and even moving to micro-USB so that an iOS hack can't feasibly enable USB drive support, they ensure the content that goes on the device is legal and paid for.

If you own the media in Blu-Ray or DVD, you can rip it in a suitable format for the device. If you own purchased content, it will work in iTunes. If you have personal movies, they can be re-encoded too. If you have 0.5TB of torrented AVIs, they will have to be re-encoded, bought or rented.


The original couldn't do 1080p either without a hardware modification. Component output is a slight issue but they can't support legacy formats forever. If you don't have HDMI on your TV by now, you need a new TV.


Once Airplay is enabled, you can sync to an iOS device. They gave a reason about users not wanting to manage files so it's streaming only but it has 8GB internally so the recent jailbreak might allow storing some files on it.



The omission IMO is not the purchasing but the ability to rent everything in the store. Buying DRM movies from iTunes was never a good idea - if you make a decision to buy a movie, there's no sense in paying full price for a heavily compressed format with limited playability. You'd be better getting a Blu-Ray disc if you want to keep a film. For the other 95%+ movies and TV shows that you watch once or twice, streaming is a better option - they just need to let you use it. The content owners are obviously being difficult about it but I'm not sure why. This is the digital version of the video rental store without the inconvenience and video stores are allowed to send out 100k+ films for renting that can be copied far more easily than streaming-only.


Good observation, I had thought Apple might go the web route in which case websites would act as channels/sources but apps seem more likely from a UI point of view. This way you get complete choice of your own package, no premium bundles from providers. The only downside is that every channel could impose their own subscription and would have to in order to make money.


Presumably when you say 'other rental system', you don't mean a company mailing you a Blu-Ray disc but a VOD service streaming 20Mbps sustained? The PSN network does 8Mbps 1080p, which is actually high enough for 1080p but I haven't heard of any going as high as 20Mbps.

Thing is, smaller companies can handle that but if Apple ship 1 million or more units, they have to sustain those data transfers to all the customers.

It has to build thumbnails. Your computer will be busy for a while as iTunes does this. Once complete, they are all there.

I have tens of thousands of photos in my Aperture (!!) libraries and they all stream just fine. In fact I'm enjoying them right now while listening to music. Without having to sync them to the @%^^# hard drive first (woot!)

For me the improved photo handling was more than worth the price of the new ATV. It's a photographers dream! The fact that it seamlessly integrates with my Aperture library is a double bonus.

That's funny, it uses the one on my computer flawlessly. In fact, my computer hard drive is much bigger than any hard drive I could plug into my previous ATV (since it's really an internal RAID array on my Mac Pro). And no need to sync - esp. for photos is very, very welcome.

I have no need to duplicate data on yet another device in my house. I can see the limited appeal of having a hard drive on a device like this, but for the vast majority of people it's a needless layer of complexity and expense. Heck, even my Mom leaves her iMac on (mostly as a large digital picture frame due to the excellent photo screen savers Apple includes).

I haven't played around with it to test it, but my understanding is the ATV can even wake your Mac up if it's sleeping. I sincerely doubt the target audience for the ATV will care one whits about local storage. Indeed, they will more than likely vastly prefer the much simpler ease of use.

Home Sharing was a boon - I logged into the ATV once and the home sharing showed ALL my iTunes libraries, enabled rentals and activated my Netflix automatically (no device paring codes here!). Talk about an awesome out of the box experience - puts the old pairing/syncing model of the previous ATV to shame and I hope they update the software on the old ATV to at least support Home Sharing too.

I think you meant AirTunes and the new ATV shows up in my iTunes right along side my old ATV as an option for speakers.

They could start charging a realistic price for their rentals. At the moment they are just about twice what a video store would charge

No, I mean Blu-ray movies/tv shows, that is the only other video rental system I have available to me (I have no access to VOD, we have no PSN rentals in this country). So AppleTV is competing against my local video store, and at the moment they are losing. I have one of the old model AppleTV's, and I haven't rented a single movie through it, they are more expensive, and of a lower quality than the other option I have available to me.

It's also an issue with older and art house films. From LoveFilm recently I've had Last Tango in Paris, Plein Soleil, Cold Mountain, Damage. None of these are available on iTunes, none of these are even available to rent on LoveFilm's own site (or some that aren't available on iTunes are, like Caravaggio). iTunes doesn't even have excellent, well received recent films like The Talented Mr Ripley. It will only be a genuine replacement for video rental when the library is more extensive.

Why is supporting different formats such a pain?

I'd rather not have to convert all my personal videos from AVI to MP4 just so it plays nice with the Apple TV. Although at £99, it's pretty cheap. Hopefully when they add app-store support it should be closer to an "all-in-one" solution.

Edit: Also agree about being able to see photos on the TV, which will be even better once Airplay is out. The Apple TV solution is far better than the ol' projector and slides for checking out someone's vacation pictures.

There are many other considerations other than technical difficultly.



With 8GB NAND, when none its class have that (or need it for streaming) and on a device already on a suspectedly slim net profit margin it seems that an App Store will happen. If so there are already apps for the iPad (and maybe the iPhone) that allow you to use the iTunes import option in the app to copy and play pretty much any video container and codec you can think of. That may be an option.. if and when.

Indeed there are, I was simply musing. But, if I can recall, Roku seems to be able to do it. Ideally format incompatibility wouldn't exist, but that's dreaming a little too much. I'll probably just upload my videos to the MM Gallery.


I imagine we will see something like the VLC Player that debuted not too long ago for the iPad. Although I've heard it has been having some teething problems. I'm quite interested in seeing some games on the device, not sure what kind of graphics it can pull off, but after seeing the Unreal iPhone demo...

Well, after over a week with my new AppleTV I'd give it a 4/5. Maybe higher. Why? Because it didn't cost me much, it does what I expected better than I expected, it is way nicer to use and look at than my PS3 Slim, it has some really slick usability features, and it is small/silent/cool.

* I wouldn't notice if it had 1080p.
* I don't want a hot, expensive, noisy, large, failure prone, power sucking hard drive in it that I'd have to worry about managing.
* I don't need it to replace things I already have, but it provides more options and does some of the existing ones better.
* I'm optimistic about the possibility of software improvements in the future (i.e. new channel apps).

I'm also very curious whether it can (or will in the future) be able to stream iTunes Library to content sitting on a NAS (like the new WD MyBook Live).

More than worth the money. Unspoiled by the need to satisfy everyone's lengthy feature list demands. And what a relief that is.

I just received my 2nd Gen AppleTV today and couldn't be happier with the results. Faster, quieter, and cooler (literally). Did I mention faster? I mean, compared to the 1st Gen version, this thing rocks!

My 1st Gen unit now gets recycled and I couldn't be happier about that as well.

Next up, a RocStor 8TB Raid array to handle all my legally ripped library.

Really who cares if it is better than this or that?
Buy what you want. If it is something that you cant live without and you choose a different product then Apple will eventually pay attention or not. I really don't want to hear people whining about 1080P and ability to access some facebook app.
i like both my new and old one. Neither are perfect, but both have some really cool features. I will hack the heck out of it to make it serve my needs if I have to

Like you said.... who cares?

I am currently streaming off of my LaCie Quadra D2 2TB via Airport Extreme. Not a true NAS solution, but a solid working one none-the-less. Yes, it does require me to fire up my MBP every time I stream, but I bring it home every night anyway, so not that big of a deal.

Eventually, I will commit to a MacMini as a Home Entertainment Server with the Rocstor RAID I just bought. Then I will be able to stream to any number of AppleTVs in the house. Plus, I don't clog up my MBP with all the content I have ripped or purchased via iTunes.

I spent $6,000 on a 55" plasma five years ago, it works fine, I need HDMI to DVI and not a bag of hurt.

That might not work. DVI inputs on TVs (especially older ones) are meant for PC input and some have fixed inputs of 1024 x 768 and it squashes the images. If you've already tested HDMI input via DVI and it works, then maybe an adaptor will work for you but I would very much doubt it.

If you were willing to spend $6000 back then, $900 this year should be doable:

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-PN50C5...877101&sr=1-19

You might even make enough money selling the old one to pay for the new one entirely. You get a future-proof TV with a full 12 month warranty.

I bought the Apple TV on Saturday and I think it's pretty great. I love watching Netflix through it but have noticed it freezing some.

While their may be several reasons for the freezing, I also had some issues last week, and one night in particular.

To my surprise, I received a "Sorry for the problems" email from NetFlix, along with an offer for a small refund for the month.

LOL. You do realize that Apple doesn't design the Netflix does. Further, can you tell me where the straight category is located? I am having trouble finding it. Finally, last I called Apple recently donated a hundred thousand dollars to fight against your "oppression, where companies like Target where fighting to keep you oppressed.

In all honesty, Apple TV 1.0 didn't thrust into the living room, and we've been waiting for them to step up and make a revision that was. Apple TV 2.0 is their answer. (Let's stop calling it Take 2, please!) It's everything Apple TV should have been when it launched, complete with audio and video podcasts, Flickr and .Mac integration andmost importantlymovie rentals without a computer. At $229, it's an essential part of any iTunes user's living room arsenal.

This makes no sense at all. "Any iTunes user" is obviously using iTunes with a computer, so why is a computerless Apple TV needed for any iTunes user? At $99, the Apple TV 2 makes much more sense. Add the fact that AirTunes doesn't work with Apple TV 1 and it's a no brainer for any iTunes user whose media includes music.

I know this is an old thread but for someone who buys almost everything Apple comes out with (including the 1st ATV), I still haven't bought this specifically because of the lack of a hard drive. This is a HUGE omission in my mind for 3 reasons:

1.) I often have my laptop off when I'm not using it. It saves power and eliminates the possibility of malicious activity.
2.) Streaming everything from your laptop or computer shortens the life of that hard drive and other components. My laptop gets enough use, why start streaming stuff from it? It is much more expensive to replace a laptop than an ATV.
3.) You always have to have iTunes running. Even if you leave your MacBook running all the time, iTunes needs to be running too. So if you're listening to music on your stereo while trying to get work done, expect your machine to be running slowly.

Please, please Apple, put a reasonably sized hard drive back in the next version.

I don't think they should put a hard drive inside it because it contributes to the heat and size. Some small amounts of Flash memory would be ok to sync up like you would an 8-16GB iPod. It apparently does have 8GB so that feature could be enabled.

An iPod can also be used as a broadcasting device for content instead of the laptop if you had one.

If you really can't stand to stream from your laptop, go buy an old Mac mini and set it up as an iTunes server.
They couldn't put a big enough HDD in the aTV to hold all my video anyway, so why bother.

You're missing out. The new TV is insanely great. I use it every day to stream music to my living room. There is no slowdown on my MacBook Pro whatsoever. And a MacBook Pro uses almost no power. You could leave it on all year and it will probably cost you $10 in electricity (can somebody do the math?).

Of course, I could always stream from my iPod Touch if I really want to turn off the MacBook Pro or shut down iTunes.

And lastly...

"It saves power and eliminates the possibility of malicious activity."

Using a Mac, not clicking on questionable links or downloading software from torrent sites, turning on security and your firewall on your router and not running as root ELIMINATES the possibility of malicious activity. Really. And that's what you should be doing anyway.

The only thing stopping me from buying three second-gen Apple TV right now is the lack of 1080p output.

Frick's sake, it can TAKE IT IN. It's doing the conversion down to 720 ON THE FLY. It's obviously capable of outputting 1080p; it just doesn't because iTunes content isn't 1080 yet.

That was the only thing stopping me from the first gen, too, but I'm certainly glad I didn't. I'll take 6 watts max power over 100 watts IDLE any day.

If your hypothesis is correct, 1080 output will be a SOFTWARE update... So no need to put off buying it, you'll get 1080 at no cost when they're ready to release it.
And as someone else said, you're missing out by waiting...

Apple's not exactly known for giving out software that lets old hardware do what it's designed to do once the new hardware is out.

I don't expect such an update to ever exist, so I'll just wait.

Cases in point, iPhone 2G/3G video recording, multitouch on pre-pre-unibody machines (last Penryn before unibodies got the update, none before that that could do multitouch got it legitimately)... I'm forgetting something else, but you get the picture.

Yeah... i was SOOO upset that the last several iPhone OS updates don't work on my 3GS. I guess they expected e to by a iP4 to get iOS 3.

update: oh wait... they DO work on the (old) 3GS !