Apple TV Shipping Tuesday, March 20th?

[iDave]

What I don't understand is why is this ripping illegal for movies, but legal for music? Is there really a qualititative difference between the two that justifies different rules?

It makes absolutely no sense, except that movie studios have been more successful in getting laws passed to protect their content than have record studios.

The unavailability of quality video for AppleTV made me decide to cancel my order some weeks ago. I'm not satisfied with what's available at iTunes. So, my plan is to get a Mac mini instead and use it as a DVR while I wait for Apple to upgrade their iTunes Store video content.

This will cost me more money for the Mac hardware but I'll be able to dump the cable company's DVR (and its required expensive digital package of channels I never watch). The savings on cable will pay for the mini in less than a year.

 

[3282872]

Problem is, all of this is illegal. Without substantial changes to the DMCA, Apple will never support anything that encourages ripping DVDs. Besides being illegal, which discourages many people, ripping DVDs is a cumbersome process which discourages others from doing it. Until Apple (or other download services) offers aTV compatible HD content online, there's nothing too special about video on the aTV (IMO).

What about just putting a commercial DVD in your Mac, playing it wirelessly through iDVD onto your HDTV??? Wouldn't that be MUCH more simple than ripping them to your HD (and let's face it, a movie collection with 4-8 gig's per movie would be a HUUUUGE amount of data), and it would essentially replace the need for a DVD player next to your HDTV. Play DVD's from your computer wirelessly to your HDTV as well as iTunes content, music, pics, etc. TV would essentially replace a top set DVD player making your Mac a WIRELESS Media PC (as opposed to the wired Media Center's that some people custom build from Windows XP and/or Vista). Utilizing the new Airport N Base Station and N-compatible TV could easily wirelessly stream DVD's as they play in your Mac system (and maybe even Blu-ray discs as those drives become available - Sony has an internal Blu-ray drive already on the market for only $699). THEN that would make more sense.

 

[twoodcc]

well i guess we'll see if it ships tomorrow.....

 

[mrgreen4242]

Before this gets out of hand, 480p *is* part of the HDTV standard. It is an official and sanctioned HDTV resolution; The ATSC standards body differentiates only between SDTV (480i) and HDTV(all progressive resolutions and 1080i). 480p is not "HD" content in marketspeak, though, which is just 720p and 1080i/p.

I'm pretty sure you are confusing digital TV with HDTV. ATSC defines everything up to 704x480 with a square or non-square pixel, and interlaced or progressive as standard definition. HD starts at 1280x720 or about a million pixels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atsc

Digital TV doesn't mean HD TV, just that it's digital.

 

[mrgreen4242]

What about just putting a commercial DVD in your Mac, playing it wirelessly through iDVD onto your HDTV??? Wouldn't that be MUCH more simple than ripping them to your HD (and let's face it, a movie collection with 4-8 gig's per movie would be a HUUUUGE amount of data), and it would essentially replace the need for a DVD player next to your HDTV. Play DVD's from your computer wirelessly to your HDTV as well as iTunes content, music, pics, etc. TV would essentially replace a top set DVD player making your Mac a WIRELESS Media PC (as opposed to the wired Media Center's that some people custom build from Windows XP and/or Vista). Utilizing the new Airport N Base Station and N-compatible TV could easily wirelessly stream DVD's as they play in your Mac system (and maybe even Blu-ray discs as those drives become available - Sony has an internal Blu-ray drive already on the market for only $699). THEN that would make more sense.

Well, one, that wouldn't work. I can't think of any way to get DVD Player (which is what I assume you are referring to when you said iDVD which is for making DVDs) to send the video somewhere else. Two, if you are going to have to put the DVD in to watch it, why not use a $25 DVD player? The point of ripping the movie is to have instant access to all of them without the disc.

Three, you can compress DVD quality movies to about a gig to 1.5gb with a variety of MPEG4 compression schemes. Four, even storing 4gb DVD images isn't a big deal, imo. HDD's are cheap, like a quarter per gig, and falling.

 

[Peace]

I'm pretty sure you are confusing digital TV with HDTV. ATSC defines everything up to 704x480 with a square or non-square pixel, and interlaced or progressive as standard definition. HD starts at 1280x720 or about a million pixels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atsc

Digital TV doesn't mean HD TV, just that it's digital.

Here's the low-down on HDTV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDTV

 

[iDave]

What about just putting a commercial DVD in your Mac, playing it wirelessly through iDVD onto your HDTV???

You bet, that would make a lot of sense if Apple would include that capability in the AppleTV. I think they'd sell a lot more of them if you could do that.

There's one drawback to playing DVDs in a Mac vs. using a nice DVD player. Upscaling in quality DVD players makes for an improved picture on HDTV sets when playing standard DVDs. To my knowledge, Apple hasn't built that capability into their Mac optical drives or the DVD Player software itself.

 

[jaw04005]

So since my Samsung HDTV has a "non-standard" resolution of 1366 x 768, will the TV upscale from 720P to 1366 x 768 or will my TV have to do the upscaling?

On a side note, what's with 1366 x 768? It's not a broadcast standard, and it causes nothing but scaling issues. Do I select 720P and have the TV scale up to its native resolution? Or do I select 1080i and have the TV scale down?

 

[mrgreen4242]

Here's the low-down on HDTV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDTV

From your link: "Current HDTV standards are defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-R BT.709) as 1080 active interlace or progressive scan lines, or 720 progressive scan lines, using a 16:9 aspect ratio."

From an article listed in your link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/480p, "480p is not high enough to qualify as HDTV; it is considered Enhanced-definition television (EDTV)."

Since you didn't say anything other than give a link I'm not sure what you were trying to support. But, it pretty much says what I've been saying, so thanks.

 

[Peace]

From your link: "Current HDTV standards are defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-R BT.709) as 1080 active interlace or progressive scan lines, or 720 progressive scan lines, using a 16:9 aspect ratio."

From an article listed in your link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/480p, "480p is not high enough to qualify as HDTV; it is considered Enhanced-definition television (EDTV)."

Since you didn't say anything other than give a link I'm not sure what you were trying to support. But, it pretty much says what I've been saying, so thanks.

Merely linking a reference point for you guys to argue about

 

[iDave]

On a side note, what's with 1366 x 768?

Good freaking question. Nearly all 720P TV sets are 1366 x 768. I'm sure there's a reason but I've never heard a good one.

 

[skinnylegs]

Just received confirmation that my Apple TV shipped.....a day early no less!!!!!

There are other purposes: photos and music, for example.

Exactly! I don't really care about streaming movies. I purchased an Apple TV for pictures and music.

 

[Krevnik]

Good freaking question. Nearly all 720P TV sets are 1366 x 768. I'm sure there's a reason but I've never heard a good one.

Panel manufacturing. Panels tend to be cheaper at certain resolutions than forcing it into a particular resolution that isn't on certain pixel boundaries (768 is divisible by 32, while 720 is only divisible by 8, for example). So, to make the TV cheaper, they will use the cheaper panel, even if it has a couple more pixels.

The TV accepts 720p signals just fine, and doesn't even accept a '768p' signal, but scales the image itself.

 

[youngfoool]

Non-Techincal User Question

Is it safe to say that if I can use my iPod with a dock and the s-video output to my SDTV, then I should be able to use Apple TV with the component video out to my SDTV and that will work? Right? I hope? Is it absolutely necessary to have an EDTV or HDTV?

 

[CoreWeb]

Digital Rights Management.

CDs don't have it (usually), but DVDs do.

In the United States, it's illegal to circumvent copy protection (DMCA) despite the "fair use doctrine."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_doctrine

However, what I think Apple could do would be to allow ripping of (somehow) still-encrypted content, and leave it encrypted for the ripped version. Then, Apple would allow AppleTV and iTunes to play it. Thus, it is still the DVD, still encrypted, yet viewable. In other words, making an on-disk exact copy of the still-protected dvd and allowing it to be played in iTunes and AppleTV.

 

[iDave]

The TV accepts 720p signals just fine, and doesn't even accept a '768p' signal, but scales the image itself.

Ok, interesting information, thanks. I've always understood that using a non-native resolution on a computer display results in a blurry image. I'd think this would be a problem upscaling 720 to 768?

 

[iDave]

Is it safe to say that if I can use my iPod with a dock and the s-video output to my SDTV, then I should be able to use Apple TV with the component video out to my SDTV and that will work? Right? I hope? Is it absolutely necessary to have an EDTV or HDTV?

I hope we'll begin to get answers to questions like yours very soon, when people have these things in their living rooms.

 

[Peace]

However, what I think Apple could do would be to allow ripping of (somehow) still-encrypted content, and leave it encrypted for the ripped version. Then, Apple would allow AppleTV and iTunes to play it. Thus, it is still the DVD, still encrypted, yet viewable. In other words, making an on-disk exact copy of the still-protected dvd and allowing it to be played in iTunes and AppleTV.

[snippet]

Apple could do would be to allow ripping of (somehow) still-encrypted content

[/snippet]

HOW in the world could Apple,Inc. allow ripping ? Apple doesn't own or run the Government.

 

[CoreWeb]

[snippet]

Apple could do would be to allow ripping of (somehow) still-encrypted content

[/snippet]

HOW in the world could Apple,Inc. allow ripping ? Apple doesn't own or run the Government.

Because they technically aren't disassembling or destroying the DRM, they are simply moving it. If that's even possible...

 

[jaw04005]

However, what I think Apple could do would be to allow ripping of (somehow) still-encrypted content, and leave it encrypted for the ripped version. Then, Apple would allow AppleTV and iTunes to play it. Thus, it is still the DVD, still encrypted, yet viewable. In other words, making an on-disk exact copy of the still-protected dvd and allowing it to be played in iTunes and AppleTV.

The problem is you can't copy the encrypted files from the DVD to your computer without first decrypting (or circumventing the copy protection) the DVD first.

Apple would have to license both DeCSS and Macrovision copy protection. Therefore, allowing iTunes to unencrypt the DVD, copy the VOB files to your hard drive and re-encrypt them with FairPlay. Then, offer both MPEG-2 and AC3 codecs in QuickTime and iTunes for playback. Not to mention, get approval from the movie industries.

That's a lot of steps. I would expect some sort of FairPlay managed copy feature to be available with Blu-ray discs within the next few years. This should allow you to store a more compressed version of your movie on your hard drive and iPod.

 

[GregA]

Is it safe to say that if I can use my iPod with a dock and the s-video output to my SDTV, then I should be able to use Apple TV with the component video out to my SDTV and that will work? Right? I hope? Is it absolutely necessary to have an EDTV or HDTV?

The AppleTV only puts out progressive video. So your regular SDTV won't be able to handle it unless it's an SDTV Plasma (which most have been until recently).

There are ways of converting progressive to interlaced. Many computers can output TV signals and convert to interlaced.

As for component etc connections:

it supports component out, so pick up a component to scart converter for <$10 and just use that to hook it up. That's how I used to hook up my Mac Mini and it worked fine.

Will this handle the interlacing this guy needs though?
(actually, this guy said he had a widescreen SDTV... perhaps he has plasma).

 

[skinnylegs]

I could be *way* off base here (wouldn't be the first time) but.....

I think we have to make the distinction between copying a DVD to your HD versus burning a copy of a DVD. If I'm not mistaken, copy protection only presents a problem when you want to take that copy on your HD and make a DVD out of it.

 

[Krevnik]

I was unaware of that limit. Would a macmini allow for playing these as opposed to streaming them? Of course, I'd have to get these from my mac into the livingroom where I'd put the macmini. I just want the highest quality and I wonder that the 4gb limit will make rips too compressed and compromise PQ?

The problem is two-fold... one, that if you use Streamclip/QT for the H.264 encode, then you can't actually encode anything larger than 4GB or it will fail. The second one is iTunes failing to stream 4GB files (it used to be even worse, before 7.1, you couldn't stream files larger than 2GB).

I am still looking at what is the best 'toolkit' for me to use when exporting Blu-Ray to 720p... so it won't be a huge issue yet. The mini could play them, but then you are talking about copying 5GB+ files over to it.

Right now, I just target 3.9GB (with luck), and it turns out pretty good. It isn't quite as nice as the disc itself, but it is about the same as 720p broadcast. This is with QT though, I haven't tried a full-blown ffmpeg/x264 encode, which is actually my next task.

Out of interest, how long are those BRD > H.264 conversions taking and on what spec Mac?

I used the Mac Pro in my sig. I am a bit of a quality junkie, so I was using Quicktime for the video in multipass mode which made the conversion about 8 to 16 hours, depending on if it scaled to a full 7-8 passes.

Using ffmpeg or similar to do a 2-pass encode will likely take about 6-8 hours for 720p if you use exhaustive search settings on x264.

 

[72930]

I could be *way* off base here (wouldn't be the first time) but.....

I think we have to make the distinction between copying a DVD to your HD versus burning a copy of a DVD. If I'm not mistaken, copy protection only presents a problem when you want to take that copy on your HD and make a DVD out of it.

You are not allowed to back up a copy-protected DVD to a hard disk...

 

[WilliamLondon]

(and let's face it, a movie collection with 4-8 gig's per movie would be a HUUUUGE amount of data),

Are you kidding? At 8GB per movie, my cheap 2TB HDD would store 250 movies, and they'd be on a hard drive always available. Don't know about you, but I tend to be fickle sometimes when watching television - I flip around a lot even with movies - how wonderful the atv will be when it arrives!