Apple uses Imagination for their iDevice?s GPU and decoders. They have been making efficient chips that can decode high-profile 1080p that is found in Blu-ray discs for awhile now. Considering the AppleTV is not battery operated I would definitely be possible for Apple to have put in a 1080p decoder instead of just 720p.
Cool. Is the Infineon chip in other devices capable of 1080p but Apple choses not to use it for more than 720p? If that's the case, you would be correct in that argument would be moot for the AppleTV. Arguments based in platform consistency, bandwidth, storage and such are still valid though.
Does this or the current (previous) Apple TV allow you to play music to other speakers. In other words could I play a song from my iTunes library but rather than listening on just the TV speakers could I also send the signal to speakers hooked up to an aiport express
I presume the previous ATV will continue to work just fine and offer the same interface as the new one, i.e. rental only? Was there any mention of the old ATV, will it need a software update?
IMHO more of a problem than lack of 1080p (which is not the end of the world as some would have you believe) is the poor support for open file formats.
At least with an iPod you can play the most common non-iTunes music format - MP3 (although sadly it lacks Ogg support).
This new Apple TV does not support MPEG 2 (all my UK digital TV recordings are in this format), neither does it support MKV/XVID formats commonly found on the web.
So you have no choice but to buy content for it, rather than get it from alternative sources when practical and/or legal to do so.
IMHO more of a problem than lack of 1080p (which is not the end of the world as some would have you believe) is the poor support for open file formats.
At least with an iPod you can play the most common non-iTunes music format - MP3 (although sadly it lacks Ogg support).
This new Apple TV does not support MPEG 2 (all my UK digital TV recordings are in this format), neither does it support MKV/XVID formats commonly found on the web.
So you have no choice but to buy content for it, rather than get it from alternative sources when practical and/or legal to do so.
You could of course run your torrented XVIDs and MKVs through one of dozens of video converters available.
In most cases, the different between 720P and 1080P are unnoticeable. Unless you have a 46 inch + TV monitor. ( Although the trend is that most are buying bigger TV sets anyway.... so 720P isn't very forward looking )
But the problem with Apple TV and 1080P is streaming. You cant not stream a 1080P through Internet. You can barely do that in Korea or Japan, Hong Kong or Singapore where there are 1 Gbps Internet FTTH. And that is only a small portion of the total net population. So i dont expect US and Europe can do it.
But i am surprised and angry why Apple still hasn't decide to use Mepg 4 High Profile and instead sticking to Main Profile 3.1. I would much rather they support High Profile then 1080P. The difference is quality is substantial.
I can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p with ease. I have a 50" KURO plasma and I sit about 2 meters away from it.
As for streaming 1080p, I do that regularly through my Xbox 360 (all rental movies are 1080p on the 360) and even through YouTube. Works fine for me, never a hitch. My connection is 50mbit cable.
This is a downgrade, not an actual upgrade to the current AppleTV.
For movies and tv rental, having the ability to stream from the internet is nice. But music? pictures? Why do I have to have the mac on, or an networked HDD, in order to view my pictures?
40GB of the original version where the minimum... I can both rent as well as store something on the device and not always, when I have friends visiting, turn on the mac, turn on the apple tv, stream...
I would just fire off my ATV and have it all there, "magically"....
Bandwidth is too high. Realistically, you need a 10 Mbs connection to reliably stream 1080p at a decent compression. Remember that a 10 Mbs connection is really a 5 to 7 Mbs connection, and that's only if your line is clean.
Well in France at least an 28 Mbit/s enhanced ADSL2+ line is the norm, cable goes up to 100Mbit/s and FTTH is available in large cities. I know it isn't exactly there in the US and I do feel sorry for you.
It's a shame that the video handling isn't boosted. I can deal with a lack of 1080p at the price point (and because I don't have a 1080p television, nor do most streaming services provide 1080p) but the bitrates for other codecs are quite low too (2.5mbps for MPEG4).
It's probably about equal to the old Apple TV. Which isn't to be sniffed at, considering all the components in that device a mere three or four years ago.
I'd like them to release a 1080p version in the future. Maybe they're holding the specs back to maintain parity with the offerings in the iTunes Store. One day they'll have to start providing high bitrate 1080p downloads though, let's hope that Apple TV 3 supports it (probably requires a new version of the A4 CPU with better GPU and CPU).
I seriously think that all these people here making a big stink about 1080p are either just here to bash Apple as a sport, astroturfers working for vaguely competing products, or just the clueless who got all fired up about it reading something somewhere from some other clueless person. (EDIT: And the codec thing is totally ridiculous too.)
I think there are legitimate criticisms of AppleTV -- no local storage, UI, although better than many TV devices, not exactly spectacular, Apple didn't go far enough with iOS/App Store support, etc. -- but this whole 1080p thing, which seems to occupy most of this thread, is such a red herring. Just use your Blu-ray player for your 1080p content, study up on optics, and think about something important.
I can't believe how many people can't seem to see a difference between 720 and 1080. It boggles the mind.
I can see the difference between 720p and 1080p. I work extensively with these and other resolutions, my home & work system(s) handle support a variety of these so I consume my content at all levels. I am very aware of the technical detail differences. In the end though, I simply don't care. Very very little content has enough fidelity that I give one whit that I'm theoretically missing something by watching in 720p instead of 1080p. I have watched the same content on >100" screens in both resolutions, and I don't care that 720p loses a little of its fidelity. The marginal rate of gain beyond 720p just doesn't matter enough to worry about, and frankly I'd rather save the bandwidth and capacity when streaming or storing it. And if datarate is the limiting factor, having 720p compressed less is usually better than 1080p compressed more anyhow.
I'm not alone. Apple's marketing is aimed squarely at people with the same opinion as I have, and that is because we number in the hundreds of millions. The 1080p whingers are a vocal minority, the same group that insists they can hear differences between 44 kHz and 96 kHz, or compressed vs uncompressed audio. Sure, I can hear it too... if I listen to both side-by-side. Or I'm listening for a particular note in a particular piece. I don't. I listen to the holistic whole that is the work of art (or not, in the case of most TV programming). That extra little bit of fidelity... just... doesn't... matter.
This same principle applies to many, many things in the world of tech, of course. And its not going to go away. There will always be feature-whores that obsess about every last MHz, FLOP, DPI, resolution, megabyte, millisecond, GUI feature, etc. I know and work with many of these guys (and they're all guys, generally under 40, if not 30), and it is amusing to watch them ruin their own experience because they are so pre-occupied with the medium that they forget to sit back and watch the media. Yes, I used to be one of them... then I woke up and realized I have better things to spend my efforts on.
Is there a place for 1080p? Sure. There will always be that marginal group that demands a bit more and is willing to pay for it. That group needs to be aware that they are on the margin, however, and that the amount of gain they are pushing for these days is truly minor compared to a decade (or two, or three...) ago. Going from NTSC to 720p was far far far more important than 720p to 1080p. Going from a 8 MHz CPU to a 3 GHz quad-core w/ 500 SIMD core GPU was far more important than next year's 30% faster systems. This is important to realize because it changes the business models substantially.
One thing I don't get, is why no app store? Why no Hulu? I'm not interested until there is no restirction on streaming sources.
Maybe it was a secret test of Apple's military expansion to see if boredom could be used as a WMD?
Seriously though, there is a lot of stuff they could have done to make the new Apple TV interesting, and I'm sure there is a lot of stuff that Steve would have liked to do to make it interesting, but we need to remember that Apple are subject to the same resource constraints as every other company.
The Apple TV is still very much a "hobby" project and they aren't going to pull resources from important products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Imagine if we had to wait for another 12 months (or longer) for the already long overdue iOS4 updates on the iPad just so they could create an Apple TV app store. It wouldn't be pretty
I think a little patience is required. Apple probably would not be able to get all the Networks to sign on the dotted line, if they would
show their hand to quickly and reveal that perhaps the ATV does
really run iOS. That's the beauty of having their very own chip. They
can start up anything at their liking.
Also, the great thing about the ATV now is Netflix. We can finally
try watching some of the older movies in their old library. BUT, I seem to remember that Netflix just paid a big sum of money to make the newer arrivals available sooner.
Also, that is the best way that they can outdo RedBox. I could rent 2 or 3 movies a week with RedBox. Now at about $10. I have
them ready for me to watch at home without having to drive anywhere to pick up or dropoff.
The new, smaller Apple TV announced Wednesday will stream 720p HD video thanks to the same custom-built ARM A4 processor found inside the iPhone 4, iPad and the new iPod touch.
It is not 'custom-built' it is an off-the-shelf and re-badged Samsung Hummingbird processor, as has been revealed by x-raying the two devices:
Actually, I will grant the possibility that the A4 as it appears in the iPad may be a custom order - in that it has 256mb less ram than the straight Hummingbird, though it wouldn't be something I would exactly brag about.
Quote:
The creation of it was made possible through the purchases of chipmakers Intrinsity and PA Semi.
Really? I think that statement is factually incorrect on several levels. Samsung and Intrinsity announced the development of the Hummingbird on 27th July 2009. Apple doesn't appear to have purchased Intrinsity until sometime in April 2010. What Pa Semi has to do with it, I have no idea.
Quote:
press releases
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex?-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core in 45 Nanometer Low Power Process
New York Times: Apple Bought ARM Design Firm Intrinsity For $121MM
Share
By John Brownlee (6:23 am, Apr. 28, 2010)
Confirming earlier rumors, the New York Times is reporting that Apple has purchased ARM design firm Intrinsity for an estimated $121 million.
Intrinsity was the company that helped design the Samsung Cortex A8 core, one of the fastest mobile processors out there before the A4 chip, which could only be clocked up to a 650MHz. Sources speaking to the New York Times say that Apple, impressed by theat work, picked up Intrinsity and tasked them with modifying their Cortex A* design to run at 1GHz. The end result is the iPad?s A4 chip.
Even the NYT got it wrong. The original announcement of the Hummingbirds development had it doing 1Ghz - see the above link to the original press release.
Quote:
Its inclusion in the new Apple TV makes it the first A4-powered device that does not have access to the App Store.
Actually, I would say the Samsung Wave S8500 was the first device to meet that criteria.
Guess I'll be waiting another four years for Apple to make a product worth buying.
WAIT new Apple TV is only 720p? WTF??? (this was my lil bro's response yesterday..
(so here is my reply....)
The current answer is sort of as follows of the 1080p question in GEEK SPEAK is...
*
(i said?) if your talking about watching cable tv over the air' (cable co's are linear networks) - AINT NOBODY broadcasting TRUE REAL 1080p media it cost them a whole lotto $$$ to upgrade to be able to broadcast 720p and 1080i, i doubt we'll see 1080p for another 5-10 years. By that time, there will be something better out there worth them upgrading to.
we've been sold FOOLS GOLD with all these numbers and specs -
APPLE is not dumb they understand that there is no need for the over kill and if you already have an XBox or PS3 then you will have that plugged in to your Flat Panel thru one of the many HDMI inputs, why waste the extra $$ on the higher 'p' for?? (hence the new low price of $99. vers $229.)
What benefit would there be to the consumer, broadcaster and/or manufacturer to increase resolution beyond what we have today? Even if the bandwidth existed, and if you believe the seating charts BS that at 10' you would have to have a display of about 80" before you would begin to notice the benefit of 1440 (real true HD 1080p). The majority of sets being sold are in the 40-50" range, most viewers (at 10') are not even seeing the benefit of 1080p.
it (APPLE TV) will sell in the millions.. trust me.
Comments
Apple uses Imagination for their iDevice?s GPU and decoders. They have been making efficient chips that can decode high-profile 1080p that is found in Blu-ray discs for awhile now. Considering the AppleTV is not battery operated I would definitely be possible for Apple to have put in a 1080p decoder instead of just 720p.
Cool. Is the Infineon chip in other devices capable of 1080p but Apple choses not to use it for more than 720p? If that's the case, you would be correct in that argument would be moot for the AppleTV. Arguments based in platform consistency, bandwidth, storage and such are still valid though.
Does this or the current (previous) Apple TV allow you to play music to other speakers. In other words could I play a song from my iTunes library but rather than listening on just the TV speakers could I also send the signal to speakers hooked up to an aiport express
Yes, no problem!
Legally?
And legality aside, "your own file server" immediately throws this as an extreme edge case.
Your not in the target market for the Apple TV. Nothing to see here, move along.
Your Mac is the 'file server' if it has iTunes, nothing extreme here ... no need to 'move along'.
At least with an iPod you can play the most common non-iTunes music format - MP3 (although sadly it lacks Ogg support).
This new Apple TV does not support MPEG 2 (all my UK digital TV recordings are in this format), neither does it support MKV/XVID formats commonly found on the web.
So you have no choice but to buy content for it, rather than get it from alternative sources when practical and/or legal to do so.
IMHO more of a problem than lack of 1080p (which is not the end of the world as some would have you believe) is the poor support for open file formats.
At least with an iPod you can play the most common non-iTunes music format - MP3 (although sadly it lacks Ogg support).
This new Apple TV does not support MPEG 2 (all my UK digital TV recordings are in this format), neither does it support MKV/XVID formats commonly found on the web.
So you have no choice but to buy content for it, rather than get it from alternative sources when practical and/or legal to do so.
You could of course run your torrented XVIDs and MKVs through one of dozens of video converters available.
In most cases, the different between 720P and 1080P are unnoticeable. Unless you have a 46 inch + TV monitor. ( Although the trend is that most are buying bigger TV sets anyway.... so 720P isn't very forward looking )
But the problem with Apple TV and 1080P is streaming. You cant not stream a 1080P through Internet. You can barely do that in Korea or Japan, Hong Kong or Singapore where there are 1 Gbps Internet FTTH. And that is only a small portion of the total net population. So i dont expect US and Europe can do it.
But i am surprised and angry why Apple still hasn't decide to use Mepg 4 High Profile and instead sticking to Main Profile 3.1. I would much rather they support High Profile then 1080P. The difference is quality is substantial.
I can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p with ease. I have a 50" KURO plasma and I sit about 2 meters away from it.
As for streaming 1080p, I do that regularly through my Xbox 360 (all rental movies are 1080p on the 360) and even through YouTube. Works fine for me, never a hitch. My connection is 50mbit cable.
Good! Then I won't have to worry about them being sold out as long as there is that ONE left...
I don't think anyone needs to be worried about this thing ever being sold out.
For movies and tv rental, having the ability to stream from the internet is nice. But music? pictures? Why do I have to have the mac on, or an networked HDD, in order to view my pictures?
40GB of the original version where the minimum... I can both rent as well as store something on the device and not always, when I have friends visiting, turn on the mac, turn on the apple tv, stream...
I would just fire off my ATV and have it all there, "magically"....
Bandwidth is too high. Realistically, you need a 10 Mbs connection to reliably stream 1080p at a decent compression. Remember that a 10 Mbs connection is really a 5 to 7 Mbs connection, and that's only if your line is clean.
Well in France at least an 28 Mbit/s enhanced ADSL2+ line is the norm, cable goes up to 100Mbit/s and FTTH is available in large cities. I know it isn't exactly there in the US and I do feel sorry for you.
It's a shame that the video handling isn't boosted. I can deal with a lack of 1080p at the price point (and because I don't have a 1080p television, nor do most streaming services provide 1080p) but the bitrates for other codecs are quite low too (2.5mbps for MPEG4).
It's probably about equal to the old Apple TV. Which isn't to be sniffed at, considering all the components in that device a mere three or four years ago.
I'd like them to release a 1080p version in the future. Maybe they're holding the specs back to maintain parity with the offerings in the iTunes Store. One day they'll have to start providing high bitrate 1080p downloads though, let's hope that Apple TV 3 supports it (probably requires a new version of the A4 CPU with better GPU and CPU).
I think there are legitimate criticisms of AppleTV -- no local storage, UI, although better than many TV devices, not exactly spectacular, Apple didn't go far enough with iOS/App Store support, etc. -- but this whole 1080p thing, which seems to occupy most of this thread, is such a red herring. Just use your Blu-ray player for your 1080p content, study up on optics, and think about something important.
Absolutely worthless.
No 1080p hardware support.
Guess I'll be waiting another four years for Apple to make a product worth buying.
What's worthless is 1080p with a 2 - 4mbps data stream...
One thing I don't get, is why no app store? Why no Hulu? I'm not interested until there is no restirction on streaming sources.
I can't believe how many people can't seem to see a difference between 720 and 1080. It boggles the mind.
I can see the difference between 720p and 1080p. I work extensively with these and other resolutions, my home & work system(s) handle support a variety of these so I consume my content at all levels. I am very aware of the technical detail differences. In the end though, I simply don't care. Very very little content has enough fidelity that I give one whit that I'm theoretically missing something by watching in 720p instead of 1080p. I have watched the same content on >100" screens in both resolutions, and I don't care that 720p loses a little of its fidelity. The marginal rate of gain beyond 720p just doesn't matter enough to worry about, and frankly I'd rather save the bandwidth and capacity when streaming or storing it. And if datarate is the limiting factor, having 720p compressed less is usually better than 1080p compressed more anyhow.
I'm not alone. Apple's marketing is aimed squarely at people with the same opinion as I have, and that is because we number in the hundreds of millions. The 1080p whingers are a vocal minority, the same group that insists they can hear differences between 44 kHz and 96 kHz, or compressed vs uncompressed audio. Sure, I can hear it too... if I listen to both side-by-side. Or I'm listening for a particular note in a particular piece. I don't. I listen to the holistic whole that is the work of art (or not, in the case of most TV programming). That extra little bit of fidelity... just... doesn't... matter.
This same principle applies to many, many things in the world of tech, of course. And its not going to go away. There will always be feature-whores that obsess about every last MHz, FLOP, DPI, resolution, megabyte, millisecond, GUI feature, etc. I know and work with many of these guys (and they're all guys, generally under 40, if not 30), and it is amusing to watch them ruin their own experience because they are so pre-occupied with the medium that they forget to sit back and watch the media. Yes, I used to be one of them... then I woke up and realized I have better things to spend my efforts on.
Is there a place for 1080p? Sure. There will always be that marginal group that demands a bit more and is willing to pay for it. That group needs to be aware that they are on the margin, however, and that the amount of gain they are pushing for these days is truly minor compared to a decade (or two, or three...) ago. Going from NTSC to 720p was far far far more important than 720p to 1080p. Going from a 8 MHz CPU to a 3 GHz quad-core w/ 500 SIMD core GPU was far more important than next year's 30% faster systems. This is important to realize because it changes the business models substantially.
One thing I don't get, is why no app store? Why no Hulu? I'm not interested until there is no restirction on streaming sources.
Maybe it was a secret test of Apple's military expansion to see if boredom could be used as a WMD?
Seriously though, there is a lot of stuff they could have done to make the new Apple TV interesting, and I'm sure there is a lot of stuff that Steve would have liked to do to make it interesting, but we need to remember that Apple are subject to the same resource constraints as every other company.
The Apple TV is still very much a "hobby" project and they aren't going to pull resources from important products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Imagine if we had to wait for another 12 months (or longer) for the already long overdue iOS4 updates on the iPad just so they could create an Apple TV app store. It wouldn't be pretty
The 1080p whingers...
Ironic.
show their hand to quickly and reveal that perhaps the ATV does
really run iOS. That's the beauty of having their very own chip. They
can start up anything at their liking.
Also, the great thing about the ATV now is Netflix. We can finally
try watching some of the older movies in their old library. BUT, I seem to remember that Netflix just paid a big sum of money to make the newer arrivals available sooner.
Also, that is the best way that they can outdo RedBox. I could rent 2 or 3 movies a week with RedBox. Now at about $10. I have
them ready for me to watch at home without having to drive anywhere to pick up or dropoff.
The new, smaller Apple TV announced Wednesday will stream 720p HD video thanks to the same custom-built ARM A4 processor found inside the iPhone 4, iPad and the new iPod touch.
It is not 'custom-built' it is an off-the-shelf and re-badged Samsung Hummingbird processor, as has been revealed by x-raying the two devices:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19833...hone_ipad.html
Actually, I will grant the possibility that the A4 as it appears in the iPad may be a custom order - in that it has 256mb less ram than the straight Hummingbird, though it wouldn't be something I would exactly brag about.
The creation of it was made possible through the purchases of chipmakers Intrinsity and PA Semi.
Really? I think that statement is factually incorrect on several levels. Samsung and Intrinsity announced the development of the Hummingbird on 27th July 2009. Apple doesn't appear to have purchased Intrinsity until sometime in April 2010. What Pa Semi has to do with it, I have no idea.
press releases
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex?-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core in 45 Nanometer Low Power Process
Seoul, Korea , Austin, Texas on Jul 27, 2009
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...o?news_id=1030
New York Times: Apple Bought ARM Design Firm Intrinsity For $121MM
Share
By John Brownlee (6:23 am, Apr. 28, 2010)
Confirming earlier rumors, the New York Times is reporting that Apple has purchased ARM design firm Intrinsity for an estimated $121 million.
Intrinsity was the company that helped design the Samsung Cortex A8 core, one of the fastest mobile processors out there before the A4 chip, which could only be clocked up to a 650MHz. Sources speaking to the New York Times say that Apple, impressed by theat work, picked up Intrinsity and tasked them with modifying their Cortex A* design to run at 1GHz. The end result is the iPad?s A4 chip.
http://www.cultofmac.com/new-york-ti...or-121mm/40508
Even the NYT got it wrong. The original announcement of the Hummingbirds development had it doing 1Ghz - see the above link to the original press release.
Its inclusion in the new Apple TV makes it the first A4-powered device that does not have access to the App Store.
Actually, I would say the Samsung Wave S8500 was the first device to meet that criteria.
Absolutely worthless.
No 1080p hardware support.
Guess I'll be waiting another four years for Apple to make a product worth buying.
WAIT new Apple TV is only 720p? WTF??? (this was my lil bro's response yesterday..
(so here is my reply....)
The current answer is sort of as follows of the 1080p question in GEEK SPEAK is...
*
(i said?) if your talking about watching cable tv over the air' (cable co's are linear networks) - AINT NOBODY broadcasting TRUE REAL 1080p media it cost them a whole lotto $$$ to upgrade to be able to broadcast 720p and 1080i, i doubt we'll see 1080p for another 5-10 years. By that time, there will be something better out there worth them upgrading to.
we've been sold FOOLS GOLD with all these numbers and specs -
APPLE is not dumb they understand that there is no need for the over kill and if you already have an XBox or PS3 then you will have that plugged in to your Flat Panel thru one of the many HDMI inputs, why waste the extra $$ on the higher 'p' for?? (hence the new low price of $99. vers $229.)
What benefit would there be to the consumer, broadcaster and/or manufacturer to increase resolution beyond what we have today? Even if the bandwidth existed, and if you believe the seating charts BS that at 10' you would have to have a display of about 80" before you would begin to notice the benefit of 1440 (real true HD 1080p). The majority of sets being sold are in the 40-50" range, most viewers (at 10') are not even seeing the benefit of 1080p.
it (APPLE TV) will sell in the millions.. trust me.
i know it's all about streaming, but how much local storage does this thing have?
none.