iPod Apple TV doesnt support DVDs?

[orbitalpunk]

Am I missing somthing here are is everybody else? This thing won't play ripped DVD's encoded into h.264. If you read the specs below they seem very specific in resolutions. not just codecs and i dont see the DVD resolution of 720x480.

and i just realized something else. DVD's are 24fps. so even if we downsampled our DVD to 640x480, the fps wont match there 30fps spec. please tell me this aint so.

"Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): 640 by 480, 30 fps, LC version of Baseline Profile; 320 by 240, 30 fps, Baseline profile up to Level 1.3; 1280 by 720, 24 fps, Progressive Main Profile. MPEG-4: 640 by 480, 30 fps, Simple Profile"

 

[Nermal]

I don't know of any DVDs at 24 fps, I know of 720x480@29.97 and 720x576@25. In addition, I expect that it'll play anything an iPod will play.

 

[liketom]

i have no problem with this - rip my DVD with handbrake to a Podcast standard setting for 640x480 res no problem ?

by the time the Apple Tv ships i would expect there to be some software to convert my DVD's to it anyway

 

[macjakob]

Ehhmm... the ?tv supports 720p, so I don't see why it shouldn't support DVD resolution.

 

[iW00t]

II expect that it'll play anything an iPod will play.

That isn't much of a feature sadly.

The iPod only plays 1 type of video file!

 

[liketom]

That isn't much of a feature sadly.

The iPod only plays 1 type of video file!

thinking about this - 1 iTune Movie is what 1.4-1.9 GB in size ?

when i'm done converting all my DVD's to the Apple TV my iTunes Lib will be like 300-500 GB !!!

i'm thinking if this will slow iTunes down a tad

 

[Plantman]

iTV just a downgraded MacMini

You'd be better of plugging a secondhand MacMini into your digital TV and problem solved;
- availability now
-you get a computer on top of it which can do e-mail, web surfing and games
-remote control
-iTunes store access
-Larger hard drive
-also your DVDs would play on your TV (quality is not great at present)

Am I missing somthing here are is everybody else? This thing won't play ripped DVD's encoded into h.264. If you read the specs below they seem very specific in resolutions. not just codecs and i dont see the DVD resolution of 720x480.

and i just realized something else. DVD's are 24fps. so even if we downsampled our DVD to 640x480, the fps wont match there 30fps spec. please tell me this aint so.

"Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): 640 by 480, 30 fps, LC version of Baseline Profile; 320 by 240, 30 fps, Baseline profile up to Level 1.3; 1280 by 720, 24 fps, Progressive Main Profile. MPEG-4: 640 by 480, 30 fps, Simple Profile"

 

[Chundles]

That isn't much of a feature sadly.

The iPod only plays 1 type of video file!

Geeze you're spouting some crap at the moment. First I hear you say that there will be no software updates or new apps for the "dead" iPhone and now this bollocks.

iPod plays:

.m4v, .mp4, .mov

Encoded in H.264 or MPEG-4.

So that's six different video formats to which conversion is simple.

We get it, you're pretending to be a cranky bitter Apple hater. Or you're not pretending. Either way you're getting boorish and tedious. Start checking out what you're posting.

 

[Piarco]

Geeze you're spouting some crap at the moment. First I hear you say that there will be no software updates or new apps for the "dead" iPhone and now this bollocks.

iPod plays:

.m4v, .mp4, .mov

Encoded in H.264 or MPEG-4.

So that's six different video formats to which conversion is simple.

We get it, you're pretending to be a cranky bitter Apple hater. Or you're not pretending. Either way you're getting boorish and tedious. Start checking out what you're posting.

Loving your work Chundles

I had my doubts that it would be able to any DVD (native res) rips, but as folks have pointed out, anything that iTunes can play, aTV can play. And, as I verified last night, native res DVD rips can work I'll be keeping my pre-order. And I've read somewhere that video is scaled to 720p. Now just to get my entire DVD library onto a HDD... how very tedious.

 

[Anuba]

Apple TV seems more like a jukebox for downloaded iTunes videos, really. The 40 GB drive kind of suggests lightweight usage. Let's see... all episodes of Lost (11 GB) from iTunes Store, Grey's Anatomy (9 GB), my music library (20 GB)... oops, guess the disk is full.

My friend is transferring his entire DVD and music CD collection to hard drive and he just bought a second 1 TB drive after filling up his first one...

 

[MacVault]

Why the need to sync?

What is the reason for Apple TV copying all the stuff to it's hard drive if it can just stream it from your Mac/PC just as well??? I'm confused

 

[liketom]

What is the reason for Apple TV copying all the stuff to it's hard drive if it can just stream it from your Mac/PC just as well??? I'm confused

i'm guessing that with the 720P stuff like movie trailers will need to be synced if your internet connection is a bit on the slow side

 

[stoid]

What is the reason for Apple TV copying all the stuff to it's hard drive if it can just stream it from your Mac/PC just as well??? I'm confused

That's so if you want to take it with you, you can throw some media on it before heading out.

 

[Piarco]

Apple TV seems more like a jukebox for downloaded iTunes videos, really. The 40 GB drive kind of suggests lightweight usage. Let's see... all episodes of Lost (11 GB) from iTunes Store, Grey's Anatomy (9 GB), my music library (20 GB)... oops, guess the disk is full.

My friend is transferring his entire DVD and music CD collection to hard drive and he just bought a second 1 TB drive after filling up his first one...

It is designed to stream media as well you know... so there really shouldn't be a problem not matter how big your library is?

 

[Hunts121]

i'm guessing that with the 720P stuff like movie trailers will need to be synced if your internet connection is a bit on the slow side

if you're streaming it from your computer it shouldn't matter as its your actual network thats being used not the internet connection. So you'll stream at 54Mb or whatever speed the wireless spec is that you'll be using. However if you're downloading it from iTunes etc, then your connection is the test. Thats pretty much the only use gigabit ethernet has at this point as well, computer to computer, as theres no 1000Mb internet service that I know of yet...but I could be wrong.

 

[Mac Pro 5GB]

I wonder if I could plug a USB drive into the Apple TV USB port and have more storage local at the unit?

 

[brbubba]

Loving your work Chundles

I had my doubts that it would be able to any DVD (native res) rips, but as folks have pointed out, anything that iTunes can play, aTV can play. And, as I verified last night, native res DVD rips can work I'll be keeping my pre-order. And I've read somewhere that video is scaled to 720p. Now just to get my entire DVD library onto a HDD... how very tedious.

It would be absurd for them not to support all resolutions of h.264. My biggest concern is going to be streaming a movie over 802.11g and how well the AppleTV is going to handle this. Live streaming is obviously out of the question, so I am wondering if it makes you wait 5 mins while it buffers? Also if its using the quicktime buffering algorithm then we are all in trouble, as quicktime is notoriously bad about judging when to start movies for continuous play while streaming.

My friend is transferring his entire DVD and music CD collection to hard drive and he just bought a second 1 TB drive after filling up his first one...

How big is your friend's movie collection? You would have to have over 800 movies to fill that up, unless he is just ripping them without re-encoding. Doing Handbrake rips at 1500kbps produces a very beautiful picture with little to no artifacts on my monitor, which has a higher resolution than my HDTV. Rips at 1000kbps definitely show artifacts though.

 

[balamw]

I had my doubts that it would be able to any DVD (native res) rips, but as folks have pointed out, anything that iTunes can play, aTV can play.

Substitute iPod for iTunes. anything that iPod can play aTV can play.

iTunes on the Mac/PC can handle any thing QT can handle, which includes plenty of stuff that the iPod can't. e.g. the iPod still can't play many of the 320x240 MPEG-1 music videos I have in my library from "enhanced CDs". Easy enough to use iTUnes' built in transcoder ...

B

 

[VforVelveta]

Here's an interesting question...

If I put a DVD in my laptop, can I steam that to AppleTV, rather than ripping onto my HD and streaming it?

The reason I ask is that I currently don't have, nor have had, a dedicated DVD player. Right now my 360 is my DVD player, but the drawback to that is A. I have to boot it up (not really a big problem, but worth mentioning), and B. I don't have the 360 remote, so I have to use the controller, which becomes a bit annoying when it turns off by itself during the movie from not being used, so I have to reconnect it just to hit pause.

If AppleTV can stream DVDs, it would be a perfect replacement, since my computers always on and I already have a remote for it.

 

[brbubba]

Here's an interesting question...

If I put a DVD in my laptop, can I steam that to AppleTV, rather than ripping onto my HD and streaming it?

The reason I ask is that I currently don't have, nor have had, a dedicated DVD player. Right now my 360 is my DVD player, but the drawback to that is A. I have to boot it up (not really a big problem, but worth mentioning), and B. I don't have the 360 remote, so I have to use the controller, which becomes a bit annoying when it turns off by itself during the movie from not being used, so I have to reconnect it just to hit pause.

If AppleTV can stream DVDs, it would be a perfect replacement, since my computers always on and I already have a remote for it.

This was addressed somewhere else in this forum and the answer pretty much, if iTunes doesn't play it then Apple TV won't.

 

[Anuba]

How big is your friend's movie collection? You would have to have over 800 movies to fill that up, unless he is just ripping them without re-encoding. Doing Handbrake rips at 1500kbps produces a very beautiful picture with little to no artifacts on my monitor, which has a higher resolution than my HDTV. Rips at 1000kbps definitely show artifacts though.

I've no idea, hundreds... he's got an entire wall and quite a bit of downloaded stuff too - collects a lot of British TV shows, bit of an anglophile. He uses lossless for the music so that gobbles up a lot. But he's nowhere near filling the second drive yet, he though 1 TB would be enough but when it was full he thought he might as well get another, rather than 1 TB + 250 GB or whatever. Myself I have one 250 GB drive full and spilling over onto the internal hd on my desktop computer. I like to have all episodes of various shows, and when they keep going for like 15 seasons... ugh.

Anyway, my point was, a 40 GB media drive in this day and age doesn't seem very realistic, I mean doesn't a regular TiVo have like 120 GB or something...?

 

[madmaxmedia]

Anyway, my point was, a 40 GB media drive in this day and age doesn't seem very realistic, I mean doesn't a regular TiVo have like 120 GB or something...?

I think it depends on how well ATV will stream media.

If you rip DVD's at say 1500kbps, that should stream over 802.11g right? I'm not doing the math, but I'm imagining that even 802.11b would be fine- after all it doesn't take an hour to copy a 1GB file over such a connection.

Unless you are ripping at incredibly high (read unnecessary) bitrate, the data will stream faster than the video plays. And your friend with the multi-terabyte storage will have all those movies stored in his iTunes collection, so it should be available to ATV. H.264 and even MPEG4 is much more efficient than MPEG2 used in DVD's, so there's no need to have 4GB H.264 DVD rips or anything like that.

I'm just speculating as I don't know the specifics of how ATV works. All I've seen is the clips showing how you access your ATV in iTunes like you do an iPod. So I don't know if everything must be copied over to ATV, if it can be streamed, and how you would do 1 over the other that in iTunes.

IF ATV can stream video, then the 40GB storage can function as a buffer, and as a separate store to copy movies that you can play even if your Mac is turned off. IF that's the case, then that would be pretty cool, I'd love to rip all my DVD's and play them through ATV (especially since I have 2 daughters that destroy our DVD's.) But not if I have to juggle movies due to the small hard disk on the ATV itself.

 

[Nermal]

the iPod still can't play many of the 320x240 MPEG-1 music videos I have in my library from "enhanced CDs". Easy enough to use iTunes' built in transcoder ...

Hmm, iTunes' transcoder works with MPEGs for you? I always lose sound when I try it

 

[Peace]

Hmm, iTunes' transcoder works with MPEGs for you? I always lose sound when I try it

You might be trying to transcode mpeg-2 which would lose audio.mpeg-1 won't.

 

[Nermal]

Interesting, I thought it was happening for all MPEGs but you may indeed be correct there.

Edit: Nope, I just converted an MPEG-1, and lost the sound.