I have stopped buying TV shows on DVD

Honestly the first gen Apple TV is extremely sub par in comparison to the new ones. If you have a decent router setup at home I would strongly recommend going for a new generation ATV.

In terms of SD quality for TV shows, there is a very very very small change in quality, so much so that it is near nonexistent. The reason for the loss of quality from Blu-ray to HD download is because no one has the time, bandwidth, or hard drive space to download a 50GB HD movie (which is blu-ray size). Instead they try to package down the film to 4-6GB and make it "good enough" for most people (and it is still really good).

DVD's on the other hand are more like 1-2GB in size for a film and when properly encoded with new standards, that drops to more like 600MB-1.5GB. This is of course easily downloaded and stored on a local Hard Drive.

Pyromonkey83 said:

Honestly the first gen Apple TV is extremely sub par in comparison to the new ones. If you have a decent router setup at home I would strongly recommend going for a new generation ATV.

In terms of SD quality for TV shows, there is a very very very small change in quality, so much so that it is near nonexistent. The reason for the loss of quality from Blu-ray to HD download is because no one has the time, bandwidth, or hard drive space to download a 50GB HD movie (which is blu-ray size). Instead they try to package down the film to 4-6GB and make it "good enough" for most people (and it is still really good).

DVD's on the other hand are more like 1-2GB in size for a film and when properly encoded with new standards, that drops to more like 600MB-1.5GB. This is of course easily downloaded and stored on a local Hard Drive.

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1) The first-gen Apple TV is crap. I mean crap. I can't remember the last time I had so much software trouble with an Apple product. The hard disk really didn't provide any advantages over the second- and third-gen models. They have a much-faster processor and streaming over the local network is no trouble.

2) I haven't noticed much quality difference in SD content vs. DVD. I really haven't noticed much between HD and BD, except for maybe some pixellation when you get into a scene with deep blacks. I noticed that last night in "Ted" for about 2 seconds. But since BD is also compressed video, that could be the case on the BD.

I have started leaning more toward downloading stuff from iTunes. It's a hard call. I wish they would start getting better audio than Dolby Digital and allow multiple audio tracks for things such as commentaries. That's the one major glaring omission I noticed from "Ted" compared to what the BD package offered.

However, that also means one less disc on a shelf and as of now it was $5 cheaper.

Michael CM1 said:

1) I wish they would start getting better audio than Dolby Digital and allow multiple audio tracks for things such as commentaries.

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These are my 2 exact reasons for still buying Blu Rays. I still enjoy my commentaries and special features here and there, especially for big movies like The Dark Knight trilogy. Otherwise, once the ATV supports DTS Audio there will be literally nothing missing for me as I rip/encode at high enough video bitrates that I cant tell the difference from Blu Ray.

I have quite a few tv shows and I tell ya, they really do add up. Especially when you have 20 episodes in a season. For example a 720p HD 1 hr show from apple is about 1.3GB. After a few seasons of a show at that rate the HDD fills up really fast. As an example I have 578 episodes currently in my new library. Taking up 201GB so far. add another 345GB sitting in a folder to be loaded but of mostly SD files.

Basically, Im just preparing you to have a large HDD or prepare to do some file management if you want a sizeable library alongside movies, music and whatever else you have in the library.

As far as appleTV, I couldnt agree more to stay away from Gen1. I had 3 at one point and all have been upgraded because the software and hardware were simply sub par.

Pyromonkey83 said:

These are my 2 exact reasons for still buying Blu Rays. I still enjoy my commentaries and special features here and there, especially for big movies like The Dark Knight trilogy. Otherwise, once the ATV supports DTS Audio there will be literally nothing missing for me as I rip/encode at high enough video bitrates that I cant tell the difference from Blu Ray.

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I still don't own a BD drive, so I can't rip my BD stuff. It's still pretty much a call based on features I care about. The ability to watch the videos over the cloud on another ATV is a huge benefit with multiple accounts on ATV. I bought three movies last week because they were $10-$12 in HD and came with iTunes Extras. The iTunes Extras are usually enough to satisfy my desire for bonus features, although I still miss commentaries for that one time I use them.

I also have my stuff all running through my TV because my sound system messes up when you use HDMI, so I don't even know that I get Dolby Digital sound. So the sound is no big deal. I'm hoping Apple will eventually offer upgrades to HD and perhaps better features like multiple audio tracks. I got a digital copy of "Pineapple Express," and that movie just got ITE added for no charge to me. I would gladly pay the difference to upgrade old TV shows and movies to HD where available.

I live overseas, so the best way for me to get movies is downloading through iTunes. DVDs are ridiculously overpriced here and I don't want to have to pay international shipping charges from Amazon US every time I want to buy a movie. And as Japanese homes are far from being known for having a lot of room, it really helps cut down on the storage space a large movie library will take up.

The Apple TV 3 was one of the best purchases I ever made. I ripped and converted all my DVDs and imported them into iTunes, getting the artwork and the metadata just the way I want it and have managed to store it all on a 3TB drive (now only around 900GB left). I was tempted by a 6TB WD MyBook Thunderbolt drive, but the price tag caused me to go with a 3TB WD Element drive instead.

The difference between Blu-Ray quality and iTunes HD quality isn't that noticeable to me, but my eyes aren't the best in the world. And the difference between DVD and SD quality seems nonexistent.