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New Apple TV DOES Handle 1080P

PurdueGuy said:
The AppleTV buffers, even locally streamed content. The network will NOT affect playback quality. It will affect how quickly the stream starts.
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I think it only buffers a little. For example, start a movie, give it plenty of time to stream over the whole movie, then shut down your Mac. The movie will immediately stop.

I've noticed that when streaming a movie to :apple:TV AND doing some heavy duty stuff on the source Mac, the movie will stutter sometimes. Stop doing the heavy duty stuff, no stutter.

That's subjective as I don't know for sure, but I believe the buffer is not such that playback gets too far ahead when streaming. Thus, if true, when playback would catch up to what's fed to it, a delayed wifi stream would stutter or stop playback until more could get passed to it.

Again, this is not for certain- I don't know for sure- but I can pretty much make that happen on demand on my end. If my :apple:TV was streaming well ahead of the current point of playback it would have plenty of content to keep playing until I stopped doing whatever I was doing (so it could resume the stream at full speed). Try it yourself.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
A guy using the name LowLight, posted this over at the Handbrake forums:

"I just tried downloading the 1080P Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows trailer from the Quicktime website. I dropped it into itunes and streamed it to the ATV2 where it played within seconds and without any hitches. It obviously downgraded the resolution to 720P but I was impressed with how fast it loaded up. Of note, I'm using 80211-N. When someone hacks into this thing and allows it to display in 1080P, the real tests will start"

So, could someone else be the tiebreaker here? Maybe a couple of people?
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Well unless my Apple Tv is faulty the Harry Potter trailer clearly drops frames.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
I think it only buffers a little. For example, start a movie, give it plenty of time to stream over the whole movie, then shut down your Mac. The movie will immediately stop.
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Thats incorrect.

Once the movie is fully loaded on the Apple TV you can switch your computer off and it will still continue playing
 
BlackMangoTree said:
Well unless my Apple Tv is faulty the Harry Potter trailer clearly drops frames.
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Yes, I'm not calling you a liar. We basically have 2 :apple:TVs that might be performing at different levels. If the Handbrake guy's experience proves out, I would guess you got something wrong with your :apple:TV, or there's something going on between your computer and your :apple:TV. Or, he can't see the frame drops that you're seeing. That's why I asked others to do this specific test.

If the crowd has his experience, you need to do some more detective work, or perhaps start thinking about exchanging your :apple:TV. If your experience is common on other tests, then he is mistaken about what he saw.

Either way, you, he and we will all figure it out, which should be a win for all interested.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
Once the movie is fully loaded on the Apple TV you can switch your computer off and it will still continue playing
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That's not my (streaming) experience. If you sync a movie on an :apple:TV, that is exactly right. If you download a film from iTunes (rental/buy), once it gets to 100% on the download, that is exactly right. If I am streaming a movie, but then something kicks off iTunes or shuts down the source Mac, the movie stops... even if I've been watching for 50-75% of the movie run time. I just had this happen a few nights ago, where I had to reboot the source Mac while the rest of the family were watching (a streamed, not synced) Dances with Wolves. They were way into it, but the moment the Mac rebooted, they were immediately out of it.

My experiences are on the old model :apple:TV, so perhaps the new one works differently???
 
I just played an episode of Happy Days once it was fully loaded i quit iTunes and it continued playing. Apple TV 2

The new Apple Tv has far superior streaming from iTunes blows the first Apple Tv out of the water.
 
ok im going to re download both Harry Potter trailers and try again.

Just tried The Lion of the Judah 1080p trailer and it's unwatchable.
 
The Harry Potter trailer does play better than any other 1080 video i have tried though it still drops frames in places.

1920 by 1080 video drops far far too many frames to be watchable.

Every 1080 video i have tried so far if i rewind or forward 8 out of 10 times it crashes the Apple TV.

My final conclusion is that the Apple TV in it's current state is not good enough for 1080p

Hopefully with future updates 1080p will become a reality.
 
Sykotic said:
Both Harry Potter 7 trailers I have in 1080p .mov format played fine.
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Yep. Both that I took the time to download. (Which for all you people who want 1080i or p or what ever) might want to take a vacation while it downloads as it's going to take a long, long, long, long time to download a whole movie over the internet. Played just fine. Now, do they up convert? Down convert? Sideways convert? I don't know and I really don't care. It plays and it plays just fine.
 
I just downloaded The lion of judah and harry potter 7 1080p trailers.

Both played flawlessly.

I have a cat 5 ethernet connection.
 
BlackMango, unless these latter guys don't know how to see dropped frames (I think that's unlikely), I believe you have a problem with your particular hardware. I wouldn't assume it's the :apple:TV, so I would suggest checking other stuff (router).

However, if the new :apple:TV does fully buffer the video before it plays, then I would start having a lot of suspicions that your own :apple:TV has some kind of problem. Multiple guys are posting that the things you're testing look good. Only you- that I've seen so far- seem to be having consistent problems with these 1080p file playback.

If you have some way to rule out all your other stuff, I would do that- even try different cables for the wired connection. My current guess though is that your :apple:TV is about to be exchanged. Sorry.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
The Harry Potter trailer does play better than any other 1080 video i have tried though it still drops frames in places.

1920 by 1080 video drops far far too many frames to be watchable.

Every 1080 video i have tried so far if i rewind or forward 8 out of 10 times it crashes the Apple TV.

My final conclusion is that the Apple TV in it's current state is not good enough for 1080p

Hopefully with future updates 1080p will become a reality.
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Sounds like you have a bad unit...
 
The AppleTV upscales to 1080p, at least the old one did. So now it downscales and then upscales? Great.
 
PurdueGuy said:
Right now it downconverts 1080i/p, and upconverts 480i/p.
It only outputs 720p.
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I generally consider it a winner to leave the up-converting to what should be better circuitry for that built into our HDTVs. I would think that most HDTVs will have better hardware for that than a $99 box. Maybe that's why Apple chose to do that too? (Of course, I would much rather see someone find a way to make these new :apple:TVs export that 1080p content they appear to be decoding well- which is the hard part- at 1080p).

However, it does create some potential mismatches if someone buys a cheap HDTV that can't handle 720p conversions (if such a thing exists). Also, some have apparently verified that this new :apple:TV can work with 720p60fps video, which is the highest of the 720p ATSC HD standards and a full 30fps above the (Apple) published specs for this :apple:TV. That's great news from a processing standpoint as 720p60fps exists for fast action video like sports (to minimize stutter).

I don't think anyone has had the equipment to verify if this :apple:TV can push the 720p60fps out to the HDTV at 60fps though, which could also be a potential issue for cheap HDTV sets if they couldn't handle that version of 720p. I don't know of such sets, so maybe there's nothing to worry about here. I thought the Handbrake guys would be all over 720p60, but I don't see much discussion about that (they all seem to be chasing down the very best settings for "works-with-about-everything" 1080p renders).
 
I got the sense it was possibly dropping frames on the Avatar sample I did that was 1080p. There was the slightest hint of jitter every now and then.

I didn't notice any of that on the HP trailers, The Bourne Ultimatum, or V for Vendetta tests I did. If it is dropping frames in a way that I can't perceive well then I honestly don't care.

Also, what do you mean by "fully loaded to the HDD"? Are you implying you paused it and waited for it to fully load? Are you even certain it does truly fully load or does it just cache a certain amount and then proceed to continue downloading once you finally start playing it?

There's only 8gb of flash memory in this unit. No hard-disk drive.
 
The perfect way to test if you are actually seeing 720p 60p video is to create a video where a solid black frame and a solid white frame alternate every other frame. If the Apple TV is playing the 60p video then you will get a strobing video. If it only plays the 60p as 30p then you will only see solid black or solid white depending on which color you use first. I used to have test pattern videos to test this sort of thing but I'm sure where they are anymore.

A lot of people use HDV or AVCHD cameras that only shoot 1080i 60i interlaced video. Yes this can be converted to 720p 30p for the Apple TV but you end up loosing half the framerate when you do this. Interlaced video looks like 60p video and is how we view most reality based video and TV. A 60p option for the Apple TV will allow people to convert their home movies and actually watch them at the same framerate they were recorded at.

Finally yes 1080p video down convert by the Apply TV may look better. This is because you are taking a compressed video and scaling it down. 720p compressed video scaled up to a 1080 HDTV is going to blow up your artifacts slightly. There is also a lot of color sub sampling going on in video compression. Basically you have half the amount of color pixels so the color channels in your 720p video are more like 640x360 resolution. A 1080p video on the other hand can have 960x540 color pixel channels and when it is scaled down you will see much better color accuracy.
 
New ATV cannot play full 1080p content??

Tell me if I am doing something wrong. I took my Avatar Blu-Ray disk and used Makemkv to make a full 1080p Mkv file which turned out close to 49+ GB. Then I used Quicktime Pro and loaded the mkv file (perian is installed). It took a long while for Quicktime to completely load the movie. Of course quicktime could not play the movie at all practically. The image was all disintegrated, freezing and I could barely see any picture. It played just fine using VLC and Plex however. After Quicktime loaded the movie completely I did a "Save As" mov file as suggested by some posts in this forum as the most straightforward way to convert mkv to mov. The save took quite a while and I ended up with a mov file slightly larger than the original mkv. Probably about 51GB. Added it to the iTunes library and tried to load it from ATV with no luck. I kept getting an error message something to the effect of the movie file could not be loaded try again later. Not sure what I am missing.
 
bukiwhitey said:
I just downloaded The lion of judah and harry potter 7 1080p trailers.

Both played flawlessly.

I have a cat 5 ethernet connection.
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Sorry this i cannot believe, i have tried the same trailers on 3 different Apple Tv's and they clearly drop frames. The lion of judah is very bad.

And i don't think i am the only person having dropped frames, i think i'm the only person reporting the truth or there are many blind people lol.

Take the The lion of judah trailer convert it in Handbrake with the high profile peset set the RF to 16 and the resolution to 1280 x 720 and play that back and see how much smoother it is.

The Apple Tv will fully load the entire movie onto the Apple TV even if you switch it off and then play back the same movie it will but still all on the internal HDD.
 
BlackMangoTree said:
Sorry this i cannot believe, i have tried the same trailers on 3 different Apple Tv's and they clearly drop frames. The lion of judah is very bad.

And i don't think i am the only person having dropped frames, i think i'm the only person reporting the truth or there are many blind people lol.

Take the The lion of judah trailer convert it in Handbrake with the high profile peset set the RF to 16 and the resolution to 1280 x 720 and play that back and see how much smoother it is.

The Apple Tv will fully load the entire movie onto the Apple TV even if you switch it off and then play back the same movie it will but still all on the internal HDD.
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"lol" :rolleyes:
 
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