Watching AppleTV...

One of the few Apple products I have not tried in the past albeit products with pizzazz and broadly hyped, 'is' AppleTV. Or better said, 'was', as I went out to buy me one, the 160 Gig model available since a couple of months.

Initially, following user and expert reviews, I doubted a lot. No way to expand locally, no DVD player (let alone HD or Blu Ray), downloadable films with less than 720p support, support of only a few Apple friendly codecs, etc... etc...

Anyways, I was curious enough to 'waste' some money and do it anyway... who knows, it might turn out an interesting experience despite what the experts write.

I'got to say, i am glad I did buy it. I hooked it up on a 720p native flat panel TV from Sony (a Bravia of some sort) and connected it via HDMI to get max quality possible. I also configured it to support 720p and not the higher resolutions they offer (1080i). I haven't synced with any of my Mac iTunes yet... I just keep my Powerbook up and running (being at 2.16GHz my fastest box) and stream everything thru the air, via a draft 11n spec supporting router.

The experience was stunning. First of all I did an update to have it natively support downloads from YouTube and I felt like I rediscovered YouTube altogether. Above all, YouTube is a container with clips in the millions that vary in terms of quality from quasi 720p to sheer garbage (worst than early VHS recorder material after a few copy generations). Trailers of feature films, TV series and music videos, prepared professionally of course, provide an excellent view in real sharp fashion.

To test quality I did a simple home movie montage with footage from my Sony AVCHD latest and cheapest model (paid about thousand euro in Vienna last July). The editing I did with the latest iMovie 08 and then stored the output directly in iTunes having used the best AppleTV output format iMovie suggests (960 horizontal resol). Then I streamed this thru the air to the AppleTV (no iTunes sync again, just plain thru the air at 11n) while playing it on the Bravia. I believe the difference with the original footage when I played the original clips directly from the camera connected via HDMI to the same TV is less than noticeable... practically impossible to see... actually the TV's 720p native horizontal resolution of 1280 pixels is being filled by the compressed clip resolution of 960 pixels (pretty close to be noticeable at all!). For all practical reasons you actually get a wonderful self-made home movie experience.

As for photographs and slide shows the quality is even better... I believe there it uses the full native horizontal and vertical resolutions and displays the slides (always stored at the iTunes side of the workflow) in stunning HD quality (provided they themselves have the right resolution, of course). If you create a playlist with your favorite music on the iTunes, you can stream that along too to accompany your slide show as well.

For picture display, make sure you organize your shots in albums. I had to do that as the current AppleTV software version does not recognize the iPhoto 'events' recently introduced by Apple. So, although all my shots were event organized and I had them all published on my Web Gallery, I had to drag and drop events on the contents list space of iPhoto to automatically create Albums for AppleTV display as well. I hope in the future they'll be able to upgrade AppleTV to read directly from events.

One of the challenges we users are often facing is the myriad of available codecs used to display video material; basically we all get frustrated with questions like these:

1. Given our objective to display the best possible video thru AppleTV on a given type of flat screen or a Tube TV, what is the most optimal codec we could use?
2. Which codecs does AppleTV support for streaming? Can it use all of the codecs supported by iTunes itself? (Obviously not)
3. If you know the answers on 1. and 2., then how do you convert footage from existing material of yours into the optimum format that you decided from those answers?

Let me tell yea, this is the hardest part of the equation and it is totally... independent of AppleTV itself, whatsoever! In other words, it's the same issue with PSP and the Video iPod and... Zune for that matter. The good news is, almost everything you can think of is possible and there are multiple software solutions to the same problem. The bad news is that looking for the best solution is like looking for a needle in a haystack. My advice is if you find some workflow works for you, document it thoroughly and keep repeating it. Will save you stress and time.

I believe that only real experts of codec technologies and a deep understanding of digital video intricacies are able to look at a problem and suggest the best solution. If you happen to know someone like this, you are one lucky bastard! The rest of us will keep trying until we find a semi-optimal solution.

I have one little advice from my experience on this... before you go look for complex solutions, try either Quicktime Pro or VLC for format conversions. Avoid like hell Roxio Crunch! I tried it and I should sue the bastards, I swear! Insulting my intelligence! I'd probably publish comparative outputs from the free VLC and their friggin' Crunch. A shame! Real pity as their Titanium Toast is one good disk burning app.