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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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ABC's new HD Player and Apple TV

No soup for me. I guess all the buzz out there fails to mention Vista isn't supported.

Maybe I should get a Mac so I can be a fanboy again?

BTW, I'm with Torres. The video on the Apple TV looks like crap. And Scoble, it's not a sharpness issue, it's the fact that the iTunes videos are 640 x 480 and generally look fine at 480p but not anything greater.

I'm not even sure why they have them on display in the store. What I saw would not convince anyone I know to buy one. Maybe it's good for Music and Podcasts, but not for TV Shows. Right now I can play my iTunes Video on my Vista Media Center in full screen using iTunes and it works fine.

I was in the Apple store the other day and the output was correct.

Not sure why the Apple TV has HDMI since it's pretty much useless given the video quality sux.

Software
Posted Tuesday, April 03, 2007    Permalink    Comments [6]  View blog reactions

 

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 9:43:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Actually, the AppleTV videos I've been buying from iTunes are 640x360, or 50% less pixels than NTSC, 720x480.

So that would explain why they're soft. :)
Don MacAskill
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 9:44:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Oh, crap, didn't realize my email (even mildly obfuscated) would be shown. First blog comment in many years that's done that.

Omar, can you change that or edit my comment to get rid of that?
Don MacAskill
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 10:09:14 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Is this a problem caused by lack of HD content? Because as far as I know the Apple TV is still capable of handling video up to 720p...which is still lackluster, but it's better than SD.
Alexander Scoble
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 2:46:46 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
How do you watch iTunes videos now on Media Center?
Scott Hanselman
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 6:31:42 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
My understanding from a buddy at Disney is that they'll be moving itunes video content to 720x480 as content providers re-encode their movies/shows but that the transition will take some time. Also because of the nature of some of the deals in place, many will continue to provide 640 x 480... (some content providers consider 720x480 to be another product)

I imagine there's also a download time/quality sweet spot..... do people want to wait an extra x minutes to for extra resolution on every single type of video content? I suppose it depends on your connection speed. I'm not sure I care about it for video podcasts and stuff like that...

Also there's certainly no hardware or software limitation that makes even higher quality a possibility... my guess is that quality will ramp up over time as the market develops and apple introduces new models with bigger hard drives.

---
You seem peeved by the ABC thing... but as a percentage of OSes out there in use in the world Vista's market share is still tiny. Give it time, give it time.
tim
Tuesday, April 03, 2007 9:03:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Scott, I just launch iTunes fro my couch using my microsoft wireless keyboard and play the movie in full screen.

at least till mcetunes works on Vista.
Omar Shahine
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