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New Apple TV Offers 8 GB of Internal Storage, 256 MB RAM

paradox00 said:
You only need a buffer, you don't need to store the whole movie.
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You do need to store the movie if it is a 24 hour rental. Maybe not NEEEED, but it is a smart thing to do to avoid bandwidth being soaked up on each review.

I looked at movies I have, and they are 2 GB for about 2 hrs. or HD. So people can rack up a nice movie night on their device and not need to deal with potential glitches and gaps due to stilted internet connections.
 
They have to have bigger plans for this.

As others noted, you don't need near that much room for a robust streaming buffer, so they have to intend something more with it.
 
critter13 said:
So will the :apple:TV only access content from iTunes and iOS devices(AirPlay)? I currently have an external drive hooked up to my AEBS and I was wondering if it will be able to see that.
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Good question. AFAIK, you still need to have a computer on with iTunes running or an iOS device to stream content to a new Apple TV.

What I would really like to see is a firmware update to a Time Capsule which would allow me to store iTunes media on that drive, and have Apple TV access it as if iTunes was on it. That way, I can shut down my iMac. Also, it would be beneficial for people who have laptops as their main computer.
 
roland.g said:
There are TVs now with Apps built in that have FaceBook and Twitter functionality as well as YouTube in the TV out of the box.
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That is not going to last. I am not sure why tv makers are imbedding this stuff into their tvs. It is a horrible idea. They need something more flexible and replacable, and that is why a secondary external box the size of a Roku or a small apple tv makes much more sense. It can be moved from tv to tv, upgraded whatever.

Paying more money to get some of this stuff imbedded in a tv seems like a bad idea. Especially given the price of these external devices.
 
Lesser Evets said:
You do need to store the movie if it is a 24 hour rental. Maybe not NEEEED, but it is a smart thing to do to avoid bandwidth being soaked up on each review.

I looked at movies I have, and they are 2 GB for about 2 hrs. or HD. So people can rack up a nice movie night on their device and not need to deal with potential glitches and gaps due to stilted internet connections.
Click to expand...

This is what I was wondering too. Can I queue up multiple rentals? Will they be stored locally until I view them, or streamed only when I'm ready to watch them?
 
Mattsasa said:
thats what I have been saying!!! only apple wont do that because it would heavily cannibalize the mac mini.

the cheapest computer apple sells is $700!!!! Im not bashing apple's computers.
Its just I cant convert anyone to mac, because their budget is never over $500.

but the apple tvs hardware can easily run safari, pages, mail, some games, music video obviously, and it wont need more than 8gb to do all of that! I mean even for like education or businesses where they buy tons desktop computers as cheap as possible, and only run web and word processing on it. add a usb or bluetooth keyboard and mouse to this, and its perfect! $99, no viruses, easy to use, no headaches.


ps: i probably sound like an idiot right now, but this all seems super clear to me.
Click to expand...

Add facetime support with a camera accessory and you have more than enough power for even the most demanding call center employee.
 
Videogames?

With 8mg storage and 256mb ram, is this capable of being a sleeper video game platform? Hmmm....:)
 
Lesser Evets said:
You do need to store the movie if it is a 24 hour rental. Maybe not NEEEED, but it is a smart thing to do to avoid bandwidth being soaked up on each review.

I looked at movies I have, and they are 2 GB for about 2 hrs. or HD. So people can rack up a nice movie night on their device and not need to deal with potential glitches and gaps due to stilted internet connections.
Click to expand...

Most people don't watch a movie more than once -- I know I rarely do. I seriously doubt that the storage is used for anything more than a buffer, as a result of the deals struck with the various movie/TV companies who fear piracy. That 8 gigs is clearly meant for apps.
 
Lesser Evets said:
I looked at movies I have, and they are 2 GB for about 2 hrs. or HD.
Click to expand...

When you consider that a two hour movie on BD can be 40 GB or more, one has to really wonder if a movie at 1 GB/hour can be considered to be HD.

Even DVD can be about 4GB/hour - and you claim that one quarter of DVD bandwidth is HD?

The mind boggles.
 
laurim said:
How about people with babies being able to see a wireless cam image of the baby's room in pip?

Or a pip comes up when someone rings the doorbell or buzzes the front door of your building and you can see who it is
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Ok, I want these apps.
 
buffer only for sure

Tor Eckman said:
Most people don't watch a movie more than once -- I know I rarely do. I seriously doubt that the storage is used for anything more than a buffer, as a result of the deals struck with the various movie/TV companies who fear piracy. That 8 gigs is clearly meant for apps.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. Since the new atv is based on iOS and will be jailbroken the movie co's wouldn't want the whole movie stored on your atv because you could (theoretically) grab it off the atv and keep it, right? Seems like it would work once jailbroken. maybe it will...:rolleyes:
 
One thing to note, the new Apple TV will OUTPUT at only 720p -- no upscaling like on the previous generation which supported both 1080i and 1080p outputs. This will be an issue for those who have TVs that only support 1080i (some of the early HD-ready TVs did not support 720p). I'm not sure why Apple has done this, but it's probably because the graphics chip in the A4 can't handle the conversion (either too little memory or no direct support for scaling/interlacing in the graphics hardware).
 
fpnc said:
One thing to note, the new Apple TV will OUTPUT at only 720p -- no upscaling like on the previous generation which supported both 1080i and 1080p outputs. This will be an issue for those who have TVs that only support 1080i (some of the early HD-ready TVs did not support 720p). I'm not sure why Apple has done this, but it's probably because the graphics chip in the A4 can't handle the conversion (either too little memory or no direct support for scaling/interlacing in the graphics hardware).
Click to expand...

Do you realize that a lot of TV is broadcast in 720p?

A common misconception is that all OTA is 1080i which is simply not true yet those people cannot tell the difference.

Its quite funny when people bitch about 720/1018
 
AidenShaw said:
When you consider that a two hour movie on BD can be 40 GB or more, one has to really wonder if a movie at 1 GB/hour can be considered to be HD.

Even DVD can be about 4GB/hour - and you claim that one quarter of DVD bandwidth is HD?

The mind boggles.
Click to expand...

I have an episode of Monk in HD from iTunes store. It is 43 minutes long and is 1.38 GB. If I normalize it to 1 hour, it comes to almost 2 GB. So, it is 2GB per hour for 1280/720 video in iTunes store. The bit rate that iTunes reports is 4541 kbit/sec. This is multi pass H.264 encoding which is vastly superior to on the fly transcoding or the DVD standard which is MPEG2. Also, double layer DVDs are about 8 GB. These hold typically 2+ hour movie. I have never seen a DVD with bit rate more than about 3.5 GB/hour.

Don't get me wrong. I love Bluray and my PS3 but I enjoy it on my 1080p projector with a 125" screen and a mid/mid-high end home theater system. The PS3 audio bit rate can exceed the total bitrate of an iTunes movie. For example, DTS-HD-Ma sound tracks can routines exceed 6Mbit/sec. I have one Jazz disk that has 24 bit x 96kHz sampling x 5.1 channels = 13.x MBit/sec for just the audio!!!

That said, for most people, 720p that Apple provides is good enough.
 
KnightWRX said:
Or like most everything in storage technology, the 8 gigs was probably cheaper than anything less at this time. Yep, 4 gigs was probably more expensive for Apple to purchase and put in these boxes. Hence the 8 gigs.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I thought when I read the headline. Apple doesn't make 4GB anything. Apple has enough 8GB's just laying around from iPods, iPhones, and iPads to just throw one in.
 
ShiftyPig said:
This is exactly what I thought when I read the headline. Apple doesn't make 4GB anything. Apple has enough 8GB's just laying around from iPods, iPhones, and iPads to just throw one in.
Click to expand...

Actually Apple really doesn't make anything, and probably doesn't have much surplus parts lying around the campus. I doubt the oversees manufacturer who is actually making the the new Apple TV is limited to 8 gigabyte Samsung chips, though. Those chips were chosen for a reason and that is to allow future expandability. I really doubt this devise will be on a yearly upgrade cycle -- no need for that -- and the current hardware needs to be viable for several (probably 2-3) years.
 
gugy said:
Sure,
That's what they say, you get what you paid for.

I love the Mini and I am considering it as HTPC. I just feels is expensive for just using that way.
Click to expand...

I would agree if I used it just for that.

One way I use it is to make copies of my DVD's as .dvdmedia files, which is basically an ISO of the disk. Takes 30 minutes per disk, and keeps all the closed captioning info. I also use it for large encoding jobs. I keep my footage (video and audio) on a NAS, I do the editing on my normal computer and then use the MacMini to do the encoding afterwards. Its pretty slick, since the files are on the NAS, the pathway to them does not change between computers. All I do is to use Back to my Mac and screen share with the mini, upload the Premiere Pro file to it, and then let it go. I also use it to make .dvdmedia files into ones that can by played on my iPhone and iPad. Finally, its my backup computer in case my main computer was to go down. I've made it a point to have all the programs I use installed on another account on it in case I need to pull it from the living room and use it. Since all my data is synced with Mobile Me and a NAS, I could be online in 10 minutes.
 
Full of Win said:
I would agree if I used it just for that.

One way I use it is to make copies of my DVD's as .dvdmedia files, which is basically an ISO of the disk. Takes 30 minutes per disk, and keeps all the closed captioning info. I also use it for large encoding jobs. I keep my footage (video and audio) on a NAS, I do the editing on my normal computer and then use the MacMini to do the encoding afterwards. Its pretty slick, since the files are on the NAS, the pathway to them does not change between computers. All I do is to use Back to my Mac and screen share with the mini, upload the Premiere Pro file to it, and then let it go. I also use it to make .dvdmedia files into ones that can by played on my iPhone and iPad. Finally, its my backup computer in case my main computer was to go down. I've made it a point to have all the programs I use installed on another account on it in case I need to pull it from the living room and use it. Since all my data is synced with Mobile Me and a NAS, I could be online in 10 minutes.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it helps if you can find other uses for it.
By the way, do you know if you can rip DVDs as VideoTS and Plex able to play it?
I just hate the idea of transcoding all my DVDs in Handbrake. Plus losing the ability to navigate the menus.
Just too much work.
 
Mattsasa said:
thats what I have been saying!!! only apple wont do that because it would heavily cannibalize the mac mini.

but the apple tvs hardware can easily run safari, pages, mail, some games, music video obviously, and it wont need more than 8gb to do all of that! I mean even for like education or businesses where they buy tons desktop computers as cheap as possible, and only run web and word processing on it. add a usb or bluetooth keyboard and mouse to this, and its perfect! $99, no viruses, easy to use, no headaches.

ps: i probably sound like an idiot right now, but this all seems super clear to me.
Click to expand...

You don't sound like an idiot to me. Frankly, you are kind of blowing my mind here at bit. Not only is what you suggest fairly easy but it is inevitable as part of the first jailbreak and then eventually with an iOS upgrade. So basically we have the iPhone, then the iPod Touch which was an iPhone without a phone, then the iPad which was an iPod Touch but larger and now we have the Apple TV which is basically a non-touch iPad which you supply the screen for. It all makes sense. And iOS 4.2 will bring them closer together and the next iOS will join them.
But really you suggest adding a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse to your Apple TV? Come on the iPad can fill both those roles.
 
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