Blu-Ray on iTunes
Ok I was thinking...
"The AppleTV is the DVD of the 21st century," said Steve Jobs. Well in order for the AppleTV to take over the living room of many houses, there is one thing they lacked and that was Blu-ray or HD movies/content on the iTunes online store.
The ability to download these high definition movies will of course be an increase of price... but then it would knock down the competition of DVD players samsung and many others that are creating 1000 dollar DVD players to play high definition movies.
I'm sure its not as easy to just put high definition movies, but with work I'm sure that they could...
"The AppleTV is the DVD of the 21st century," said Steve Jobs. Well in order for the AppleTV to take over the living room of many houses, there is one thing they lacked and that was Blu-ray or HD movies/content on the iTunes online store.
The ability to download these high definition movies will of course be an increase of price... but then it would knock down the competition of DVD players samsung and many others that are creating 1000 dollar DVD players to play high definition movies.
I'm sure its not as easy to just put high definition movies, but with work I'm sure that they could...
Comments
These movies take up an incredible amount of disk space and not only would they take an incredibly long time to download, but most people don't have the storage space to store even one movie, and you would more than likely be streaming the movie to Apple TV.
If you have a Mac Pro with a 750GB Hard Drive (or even multiple large Hard Drives to have enough storage space to support a library of HD movies), a big screen TV, and an Apple TV, you can probably afford to buy a HD-DVD player or Blu-Ray player.
Well if they used H.264 compress on the movies, then it could be possible.
I have been reading over at doom9 that people have been able to compress down HD-DVD movies to 720P (from 1080P) and fit them onto a DVD-R (of course, this is just the movie, no extras and such). So if I had the option of downloading 720P (my TV is only 1080i) movies from iTunes for $10-15 I would consider it. I have comcast, so a 4GB download isn't a huge deal.
I think it will be sometime before we see 1080P HD downloads though.
Well if they used H.264 compress on the movies, then it could be possible.
With a few early exceptions, HD movies are already encoded with advanced codecs like h.264 and VC1 at their 15-25GB size.
... there is one thing they lacked and that was Blu-ray or HD movies/content on the iTunes online store.
....
To illuminate Kolchak's point, you are operating on a false premise. Blu-ray is not a format, it is a medium. Blu-ray content is in MPEG-2, H.264, or WMV-HD or some other format. HD-DVD content is in these same formats. With the possible exception Windows Media, QuickTime and thus iTunes can handle all of these formats. (WMV9-HD support is available, but WMV10-HD and WMV11_HD are not.)
The issue is one of bandwidth. With a Blu-ray disc holding 50 GB of content, downloading it over most people's broadband Internet connections will be a very slow and painful process. With a connection through high-speed broadband and an up-to-date iTunes, you should be set.
Ok I was thinking...
"The AppleTV is the DVD of the 21st century," said Steve Jobs. Well in order for the AppleTV to take over the living room of many houses, there is one thing they lacked and that was Blu-ray or HD movies/content on the iTunes online store.
With stereo-only sound and lack of subtitle, I don't see how that's possible.
Apple should transplant the motherboard of the AppleTV into the Mac Mini case, add one of the upcoming slot-loading Blu-ray drives and call the new model AppleTV+.
Except the AppleTV is not powerful enough to play Blu-ray movies.
With the possible exception Windows Media, QuickTime and thus iTunes can handle all of these formats.
No they can't. HD-DVD and Blu-ray can use High Profile H.264 which QuickTime does not support (either to play-back or to encode). QuickTime only goes up to Main Profile.
Wikipedia has good info on H.264. Have a read of the "profiles" section.
Blu-ray is not a format, it is a medium. Blu-ray content is in MPEG-2, H.264, or WMV-HD or some other format.
The blu-ray and HD-DVD standards both specify three video codecs: MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 (which is based on WMV9). Other codecs are not supported.
I think he might have been referring to "some other format" not being supported.
Indeed. I was just trying to offer some clarification.