Did you ever stop to think that Steve gave you just ALL the stuff you wanting in a little device called a Mac Mini!!
You are the second to suggest this, but you are flat out
wrong. I'm not going to keep repeating myself over and over again to explain why so I suggest you look for that post instead of posting nonsense all over again. For starters, you might look at the control interface (or the total lack of one unless you count the hopelessly outdated Front Row) and the total lack of Blu-Ray support in OSX.
Ironically, a *PC* running Windows7, ironically, COULD do and be what I talk about if it had a proper unified control interface that is simple enough to use in home theaters (i.e. you should not have to run it like a regular computer). But a Mac is wholly inadequate for the job given its tiny internal hard drive (2.5" based is unacceptable given you cannot even fit 1TB in it and having to expand externally defeats the point of a home theater shaped box). You cannot access existing HD rentals (that ATV uses) from a Mac Mini under ANY circumstance (defeats the ENTIRE point of the box). There is no simple living room method to convert DVDs, let alone Blu-Ray discs to be stored on its hard drive or a house server (more work). Without the governing interface to make access to Netflix, Hulu, etc. easy to use from a remote type situation (or at least a good controller like a Wii type remote to make navigating such sites simpler), all you end up with is a bloody PC sitting in your living room and having to use the same old mouse-type controls that are NO GOOD for that kind of situation.
In short, your idea
sucks because it's 85% incomplete and does not deal with ANY of the shortcomings of being used in a home theater environment. You could run something like Plex instead, but it no more handles Blu-Ray, ripping and encoding (ala iTunes CD ripping ease for movies) any more than iTunes or ATV does. In short, it's not a total or elegant solution to home theater AT ALL. The only benefit about ATV is the ability to handle 1080p and possibly internet-based video services from 3rd party software without "hacking". But you also lose the best feature of ATV over such a setup and that is the ability to rent thousands of HD titles (only a few can be rented or purchased outside ATV). And until recently, the Mac Mini didn't even have HDMI and thus it was unsuitable for rentals anyway.
Also have you thought that maybe this is not all Apples decisions that effect product realeases. There are a lot of legal, license, and copy right issues that have to be ironed out and as successful as Apples has been especially the Music Industry, other Media Companies tread lightly as to what Apple has planned.
Man, did you read the other guy's post and copy it point for point? Give it up. Apple already has rentals for all those movies. They can't seem to get the license to SELL those titles or use them with non-HDCP Macs and thus the reasons Steve has no rentals for the thousands of titles ATV handles for regular Macs and thus the reason that iTunes sucks so hard compared to Blu-Ray where thousands of movies are available to both buy and rent. Yes, you can encode your own stuff (illegally) from either BD rips or pirated material, but that is hardly an elegant home theater solution.
And while I am sure Apple wants to push iTunes content because it's money to them, remember iTunes is a big part of Apples user experience. With iTunes Application and Apple's Hardware it great combination. These TWO hardware/software integration is a big part of the iPods success. But also Apple has shown it plays well with others. They played well with Google for the iPhone(of course look what Google did
), now they playing well with Netflix.
WTF is your point? You cannot rent most HD titles except through ATV. You cannot buy hardly any titles in HD from iTunes. iTunes will not handle any 3rd party formats (home videos will have to be converted to M4V to even watch them through that archival system). Worse yet, Apple is increasingly releasing buggered versions of iTunes in order to meet hardware release dates when the software clearly isn't ready (i.e. iTunes 10 crashes 50x more often than iTunes 9, but they had a deadline so they shoved it out the door anyway). If Apple wants to keep the reputation of iTunes mated with Apple hardware intact, they better start thinking more about QUALITY than being in a hurry to meet timetables. NO ONE wants a POS full of bugs and crashes or in the case of a certain iOS hardware device, dropping calls constantly because they were in a hurry to get your money.
I understand you WANT IT ALL and you can by putting a damn computer in you living room!! But Apple too has to tread lightly with the "content companies". Business is business and its a cut-throat industry.
Bullcrap. Content companies have NOTHING to do with ATV not sporting BD. They have nothing to do with a decent remote. They have nothing to do with app support. They have nothing to do a lack of 1080p support both on ATV and in iTunes. They have nothing to do with 3rd party format support in iTunes (so you don't have to convert all your existing material including home videos to M4V just to get them to work and then without 1080p and no DTS support or any other modern audio decoder support like Dolby True HD, etc.) They have nothing to do with a lack of gaming support on the the device of any kind, the lack of a front panel display for title information (forcing a TV/Projector to be on even when only playing music titles, wearing the bulbs out when it should be unneeded for music). It has nothing to do with a lack of facilities to converting your existing DVD collection as iTunes does for music CDs. It has nothing to do with the lack of an iTunes style visualizer to use with music CDs (only being able to watch photo slide-shows). It has nothing to do with the lack of support of UPnP or NAS storage devices (thus requiring a PC or Mac to be on and running in order to watch your streamed material). It has nothing to do with the lack of external drive support on the device (at least without hacking). The ATV interface doesn't even give the time of day (let alone weather reports like XBMC) despite the device having the time internally. Forget alarms or sleep modes, etc. I'm sure Hollywood prevented those from being included as well!
Plus who are to judge Steve's business. The man started a Billion Dollar company from his garage, pioneered the Macintosh, left the Company he
found, found another company, no two, Next and Pixar, the former to become what is now the OS you are currently running, MAC OS X, and Pixar?
WTF does any of that have to do with whether a consumer buys a product or not????? Oh, Steve is a great rich guy who made Pixar so I'm going to just buy anything he sells? Man, are you living in fan-boy world or something? Get with reality!
Well I would hope you know who they are. He than came back to Apple and pulled them out of near bankruptcy to now the Second highest company in Market Cap just under Exxon in just a little over 10 years. HOW IS THAT
http://www.macworld.com/article/146035/2010/02/ipad_screen.html?lsrc=rss_mainFOR A RESUME!!
Also I can't understand why people are screaming 1080p.
You don't seem to understand anything so I'm nor surprised.
Suffice to say if you have a 120" screen with a high-end projector that does a crisp 1080p and you're sitting 10 feet away, you can EASILY see the difference between 720p and 1080p. And let me tell you that such a person is not going to want to watch relatively low bit-rate 720p when high bit-rate 1080p is available (i.e. Blu-Ray).
Many people's systems will not show a big difference, but that does not mean you build for the lowest common denominator. Suppose I cannot tell the difference between 480p and 1080p because I have a small HDTV and sit far away. Does that mean I should start a large DVD collection now? No, because in the future I may be able to afford/buy a larger TV and then all my videos would be sub-standard when if I had bought 1080p Blu-Ray, I'd be all set with content for my new screen. Similarly, why would someone purposely start buying a large collection of 720p movies when 1080p movies are available? Because Apple doesn't want to support them. Yeah, right. The person simply doesn't buy the Apple product and gets a Blu-Ray player or a video display from someone else. 1080p has been available for a decade and BD for over a half decade. Apple is living in the past and it's really starting to grate. People don't want to hear BS excuses about "bags of hurt". The only "bag of hurt" is Steve Jobs himself refusing to support technology by other companies that is clearly superior to the crap he's pushing in the iTunes store (most iTunes movies are NOT available to sell even in 720p! You have to get poorly encoded 480p stuff that doesn't even have Dolby Digital 5.1 sound from over 15 years prior! (e.g. even latter day Laserdisc supported Dolby Digital AC3 5.1!)
Pleas people over 90% of the content you watch is in 720p or at best 1080i, which many say 720p is much better than 1080i. The reason is bandwidth!! Try downloading a blueray size movie or streaming that puppy. The thing is
You don't need to stream a blu-ray "size" movie. 1080p will compress nicely to 1/4 that size without appreciable increase in artifacts. BD has the extra room so they use less compression. It's that simple. It doesn't mean a streamed movie has to be that large. A 4-5GB sized BD ripped/encoded movie will still look better than a 720p Apple 2.5 GB movie and it will stream just fine over a network. If you have 10Mbps Internet (increasingly common), it will stream in real time over the Internet even just as 720P Apple movies will on a 5Mbps network. You'd need a 40minute to 1 hour delay on a 5Mbps Internet connection (still competitive against having to drive to Best Buy or Hollywood Video in many cases to buy or rent a disc) and much more convenient. Once purchased, it will easily stream on 802.11N in real time.
it's obvious Apple is moving to the cloud. No more CD's or DVD's. Companies like Apple see those as "old" technology. Apple is building this huge Data Farm in Nort Carolina. Be interesting to see what they do with it. Maybe once it's online we will all be able to stream ALL our owned content from Apple's servers. So basically content anywhere you have a connection. And of course you can still keep you content local if you choose.
Yes, let's put our entire lives on Apple servers so they can control our lives for us! I'm sure my personal data would be MUCH safer from hackers, etc. on Mobile Me than on my own Mac. Imagine if you're writing an important document with a word processor running "from the cloud" and the "cloud" goes down (for whatever reason from hacking to local power failure to a computer bug/glitch). YOU'RE FRAKED! You can reboot or switch computers or go to battery backup at home, but you cannot control what happens in North Carolina. So no thanks. I don't want the "cloud".
TV
