Mixed ATV1 and ATV3 Environment

rayward said:

I have just added an ATV3 to my set-up, and so have been encoding for 1080p and 720p so that I get the best performance from all of my ATVs. However, when I tried to view a recent duel-resolution encode on an ATV1, it refused to play. I had to change the preference in iTunes to use 720p files instead of 1080p.

Can anyone explain to me how to get iTunes to use 1080p for the ATV3 and 720p for the ATV1s? I did not see anywhere where I could make that distinction.

TIA

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I don't think the logic in iTunes works very well and was having the same problems with both my own content and purchased from the store. In some cases, the 720p selection was used on the ATV3.

My solution was to tag the name or show of anything 1080p as 'HD'. i.e. Casablanca HD, Mad Men HD.

brucewayne said:

I don't think the logic in iTunes works very well and was having the same problems with both my own content and purchased from the store. In some cases, the 720p selection was used on the ATV3.

My solution was to tag the name or show of anything 1080p as 'HD'. i.e. Casablanca HD, Mad Men HD.

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I'm curious, how can you tell which version is being played on the Apple TV? I also have 720p and 1080p versions for some of my movies and would like to be able to confirm which version is actually being played on the Apple TV (in have both version 2 and 3).

rayward said:

It's my 1s that are the problem. They balk at anything above 720p.

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That right. Options:

• consider selling the "1". They're going for about the same price as a new "3" (sometimes a little more than the "3"). Sell the "1" and replace it with a "3".
• look into the crytalHD (third party) card for the "1". It has the horses for playing back better than minimal-spec 720p (though it involves jailbreaking the "1").

Otherwise, if you want to insure compatibility, you've got to make all decisions around the lowest common denominator (first generation) capabilities. I wouldn't hold my breath hoping that Apple would add a feature in some future iTunes upgrade to make it feed the right movie based upon which generation is being used (they've long since quit supporting options for the first generation).

my hd ripped movies lock up my ATV1 and have to reboot it, so I dont even try anymore.

rayward said:

I think if you have 2s and 3s, you're ok to select 1080p as your preference as the 2 can handle that (it'll downscale it to 720p, which is where you would've been anyway). You don't need a 720p version at all.

It's my 1s that are the problem. They balk at anything above 720p.

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Thanks rayward but this I was aware of. In fact I was able to play 1080p content with bitrates of 10-12 Mbps on my TV 2 without much of an issue--only seems to hiccup/studder if the file size of the movie is larger than the RAM available for buffer (or at least that was what I figured as it only seemed to happen for movies greater than 8 GB) so I'd need to restart the movie and quickly advance to the same spot so that only the remaining portion of the movie would be buffered.

My question was directed more at brucewayne's comment...

brucewayne said:

I don't think the logic in iTunes works very well and was having the same problems with both my own content and purchased from the store. In some cases, the 720p selection was used on the ATV3.

My solution was to tag the name or show of anything 1080p as 'HD'. i.e. Casablanca HD, Mad Men HD.

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Specifically his statement that, "In some cases, the 720p selection was used on the ATV3." This implies he had 1080p content as well in iTunes but his TV 3 was playing the lower resolution. I also have both 720p and 1080p versions of some of my media in iTunes and haven't found a way to confirm it's actually playing the 1080p version since there's no 1080p identifier viewable on the TV 3, at least that I've been able to see. As brucewayne's comment also implied he was able to determine that his TV 3 was only playing the 720p, I was wondering how he was able to determine that.