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This is still a huge issue for me and likely a reason why I'll pass on this, AGAIN. Hopefully 6th gen will include HD audio.

There's only a tiny number of digital downloads on other services that actually offer lossless or near-lossless multi channel audio. It isn't widespread at all outside of physical discs. Supporting it now is kind of pointless.
 
Better Networking:

Gigabit Ethernet
802.11ac Wi‑Fi with MIMO; simultaneous dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz)
Bluetooth 5.0

vs.

10/100BASE-T Ethernet
802.11ac Wi‑Fi with MIMO
Bluetooth 4.0
[doublepost=1505249630][/doublepost]Ima leave this here
 

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I thought that the deal was, "all movies bought in HD would be upgraded to UHD."

You'd think with Lorraine Jobs owning a large chunk of DIS, that would be a given, however, when watching the keynote, I was distracted.

I'm not worried about Disney, I think they'll upgrade to UHD as they are released. To date, Disney has only released 1 movie in UHD, Galaxy Quest Vol. 2. Remember, Disney is the only movie studio to date to upgrade SD digital copies to HD when you linked your iTunes and DMA accounts.

As far as your "all movies" quote. Apple can only upgrade the movies that the studios released in 4k so, don't expect literally all of your HD movies to be 4k over night. 4K UHD is still a young format, it is going to take a while for studios to upgrade there back catalogs.



I just want to know why Apple is willing to do this now but, they refuse to upgrade SD versions to HD?
 
If I'm spending $200 on a streaming box, I'm going to buy the best one available - the NVIDIA Shield.

Seriously, I've been hoping that this would bring me back to the aTV because I miss airplay and the other benefits of the Apple ecosystem. But this device is lacking in comparison to the Shield at the same price point. Sure the Shield has less onboard storage, but it also has two USB 3.0 ports if I want to attach HDDs or flash drives. More importantly, it will direct play anything I throw at it from my Plex Server.


Another vote for the Shield
 
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Can someone explain why they still bother with two models of this? What is the benefit of the extra 32 GB of storage? Games? if so, 64 GB is still woefully inadequate. If they wanted a legit game system they should have the second model be a 32 GB + 1 TB SSHD for 100-150 more and bundle it with a controller.

Now matter how lame the choice is, choice is still better. With that said, I'll probably get the 64 gb version. I will always opt to buy the most storage that I can at any given time. The more space means better caching and when dealing with 4K content you'll probably need a lot of it. When it works it's great, but it suffers from a lot of buffering issues - which is one of the reasons I prefer Vudu. I also think having more storage is for people who want to download a movie or two before they watch it, instead of watching the streamed version because let's face iTunes sucks at streaming content.
 
I'm curious as to how many "you don't need 4k since you can't tell the difference" and "Apple was right to not include 4K in the Apple TV 4" folks now think 4K is the greatest thing ever since Apple's finally jumped on the bandwagon (I guess when it comes to ATV, Apple skates to where the puck was 2 years ago).

Why would an ATV be a better buy then a Roku ?

I've been using a Roku 4 for 2 years and, while it's a great device and all, there are 2 reasons to use an ATV over it:
1) iTunes (why anyone would want to lock their movie content to a specific hardware vendor is beyond me but whatever)
2) You want all your apps to have the same look and feel. This is my only complaint with Roku devices. All the apps have completely different UIs. Even the onscreen keyboards can be different with some using qwerty and some using alphabetical. The ATV results in a much more seamless experience. Quite frankly, the Roku UI is pretty bad.

On the other hand, Roku is cheaper and you don't have to wait for an Amazon Prime app (wtf is taking Apple so long with this... they should have had that 2 years ago).
 
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My bet is they believe that the upgrade isn't compelling to most consumers, unlike SD->HD which is a clear upgrade to most consumers.

For me it was compelling because a) I can almost always tell the difference between various resolutions and most importantly b) the iTunes extras only came with the HD Versions. So i was salty when my old LOTR SD versions didn't include the hours upon hours of extras that came with the HD version and ended up buying the stupid things again, just to get it.
 
I'm not worried about Disney, I think they'll upgrade to UHD as they are released. To date, Disney has only released 1 movie in UHD, Galaxy Quest Vol. 2. Remember, Disney is the only movie studio to date to upgrade SD digital copies to HD when you linked your iTunes and DMA accounts.

As far as your "all movies" quote. Apple can only upgrade the movies that the studios released in 4k so, don't expect literally all of your HD movies to be 4k over night. 4K UHD is still a young format, it is going to take a while for studios to upgrade there back catalogs.



I just want to know why Apple is willing to do this now but, they refuse to upgrade SD versions to HD?

Don't question it, just be glad they are doing it. Vudu and none of the other services did it and they are charging $29.99 for their UHD copies. Hopefully this means UltraViolet/Vudu will have to follow Apple's lead.
 
No Atmos. Everything else is so good. I swear to God, there always has to be a freaking something or another. How could you possibly skip Atmos and go all the way doing Dolby Vision?!?
Are you serious?

Atmos for HT use is a joke compared to the pro implementation. And besides, there aren't more than 1,000 people in the entire world that have an Atmos HT setup.

But we are about 5 years away from having the compute-power necessary in a consumer device to have true, 128-channel Atmos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

And besides, the ATV 4k supports E-AC-3, which can carry Atmos Objects.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-ne...olby-digital-plus-dd-atmos-over-hdmi-arc.html
 
If they could have done the upgrade of previous purchases from SD to HD
That would have been awesome! Oh well at least all of my HD movies will hopefully get up graded
 
Considering you don't know what the audio support is. No, it's not something that matters to me. I have a nice audio set up that makes everything sound great. So I don't care whether it supports Hi-Res or Dolby Atmos, it'll still sound perfectly fine on my set up.
Are you for real? You talk an awful lot but I don't think you know what we're talking about...

I didn't see an Optical out; but something like this will take care of that need for $20.

61SiINbktRL._SL1000_.jpg




https://www.amazon.com/Musou-Extractor-Optical-Splitter-Converter/dp/B06XDNJ6RM/
No HDCP 2.2 on boxes like this, so no it won't work.

I bet they found that some vanishinly-small number of people were still using TOSLink, or had other devices that covered that functionality.

Personally, my HDMI Switch also does audio extraction to TOSLink; so I just use the TOSLink from that.
Again, no HDCP 2.2 devices split to optical.

-----

I think many of you are in for a shock if you think you will get surround sound without buying a new receiver. Good luck...
 
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Are you serious?

Atmos for HT use is a joke compared to the pro implementation. And besides, there aren't more than 1,000 people in the entire world that have an Atmos HT setup.

But we are about 5 years away from having the compute-power necessary in a consumer device to have true, 128-channel Atmos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

And besides, the ATV 4k supports E-AC-3, which can carry Atmos Objects.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-ne...olby-digital-plus-dd-atmos-over-hdmi-arc.html

We got faked out last time by their implementation of DD+ not allowing bitstream pass through. Hopefully they do allow native DD+ bitstream pass through so we can get ATMOS etc. and use a high bit rate in general which can sound darn close to lossless.
Specs page says it doesn't support HD audio formats like Dolby HD or Dolby Atmos.

This is still a huge issue for me and likely a reason why I'll pass on this, AGAIN. Hopefully 6th gen will include HD audio.

Audio formats:

HE-AAC (V1), AAC (up to 320 Kbps), protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, FLAC, AIFF, and WAV; AC-3 (Dolby Digital 5.1) and E-AC-3 (Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 surround sound)

Specs still indicate same audio support as 4th gen. It would really be a poor choice to not at least support DD+ with Atmos bitstreaming. No way to do Atmos without bitsteaming to an AVR or soundbar. To move forward on the video front and be stuck with decade old audio doesn't make sense. Ideally I'd like to see passthrough of HD audio codecs as well. We probably won't know until people get their hands on it or they release more details.

DD+ is what it says on the spec sheet :-/ To be fair though, DD+ uses E-AC-3 which can do bitrates up to 6144Kbit/s. But knowing how Apple roll, that will probably be choked at 640..

No Atmos. Everything else is so good. I swear to God, there always has to be a freaking something or another. How could you possibly skip Atmos and go all the way doing Dolby Vision?!?

[doublepost=1505247605][/doublepost]No Dolby Atmos and/or DTS: X with Apple you can never get it all at once... hopefully a later firmware update?

Are you serious?

Atmos for HT use is a joke compared to the pro implementation. And besides, there aren't more than 1,000 people in the entire world that have an Atmos HT setup.

But we are about 5 years away from having the compute-power necessary in a consumer device to have true, 128-channel Atmos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

And besides, the ATV 4k supports E-AC-3, which can carry Atmos Objects.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-ne...olby-digital-plus-dd-atmos-over-hdmi-arc.html
 
Excited that they are upgrading all current movies in HD to 4k... have kept holding off waiting for the day that they would release the 4k Apple TV so i could start purchasing those movies. Now I don’t have to!
 
Ok hopefully this isn't a stupid question but I haven't seen it addressed anywhere.

I don't use my 3rd gen Apple TV for watching movies anymore as it largely became redundant when we got our 4K tv as the tv's onboard apps include things like Netflix and Amazon for 4K content.

Upgrading to the new Apple TV seems a bit ott just for iTunes content in 4K especially as my Mac mini which also is the grunt work behind my plex media server is connected directly by hdmi to my 4K tv, so any films I rent or purchase in iTunes I just stream direct in iTunes itself on my mac connected to my tv.

Will my mac be able to stream iTunes 4K content just like it currently does iTunes 1080p content? I ask because it being an old Mac mini it struggles to play downloaded 4K content (though streams web based 4K content like on YouTube just fine). I suppose the question is where is the grunt work done for streaming iTunes content at apples end? or at my macs processor?

Mark
 
I have zero interest in the new iPhone, cell phones have capped out imo, the edge top edge screen is cool but not worth the price. But this new AppleTV 4K is a great update as is the TV app into Canada, I will be buying this and cutting the cable cord. Been awhile since Apple gave me a reason to buy.
 
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We got faked out last time by their implementation of DD+ not allowing bitstream pass through. Hopefully they do allow native DD+ bitstream pass through so we can get ATMOS etc. and use a high bit rate in general which can sound darn close to lossless.
But bro, you still have to have an HDCP 2.2 receiver with Dolby Vision capability or you won't get those things. You can't plug this apple tv into a receiver that isn't at least HDCP 2.2, which literally wouldn't be a thing if they just included a freakin optical port. Everyone who doesn't have an HDCP 2.2 receiver will have to upgrade. I'd bet on it.
 
Are you serious?

Atmos for HT use is a joke compared to the pro implementation. And besides, there aren't more than 1,000 people in the entire world that have an Atmos HT setup.

But we are about 5 years away from having the compute-power necessary in a consumer device to have true, 128-channel Atmos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos

And besides, the ATV 4k supports E-AC-3, which can carry Atmos Objects.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-ne...olby-digital-plus-dd-atmos-over-hdmi-arc.html
I don't need 128 channels of audio in my home. My wife would kill me :)

With that being said, consumer Atmos is more than just additional sound channels, it also includes higher audio fidelity. I'm not a purist but my Xbox One S has Atmos support, would have been nice for Apple to follow along with the industry rather than save a buck or two on licensing fees and assuming we all use TV speakers.
 
I also think having more storage is for people who want to download a movie or two before they watch it, instead of watching the streamed version because let's face iTunes sucks at streaming content.

Where is this an option in the current or beta of tvOS? I saw someone else bring this up as a benefit to the additional storage, and I said storage is only for apps and app related content (as far as I've seen in any developer docs), not for "pre-downloading" iTunes content - and it's not to be confused with pre-loading some of the content stream for buffering (even if this buffering mechanism downloaded the entire movie during the streaming, I've never seen anything in the SDK that alludes to a complete offline download for watching later). You know, as opposed to the very clear option on iOS/macOS to download the content for total offline viewing.
 
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