Apple TV is the latest ground-breaking hardware from the folks that gave us the iPod. The iPod has passed the 100 million units mark, surpassing all other portable media players in sales. The outgrowth of this technology is Apple TV. The geniuses at Apple have a way of building innovative and highly desirable products into attractive packaging and Apple TV is no exception.
As home theater designers, we’ve long advocated the use of the ‘media server’ in our installations, partly for the ease of use factor, but lately because the media server has the ability to step right around the HD-DVD/BluRay Disc war, and get you HD content without worrying about what disc player to buy. The single most limiting problem with the media server is cost, with some systems topping $10,000. That always struck us as odd, since all a media server is really just a computer with a lot of hard drive storage and some bells and whistles. But they are expensive bells and whistles! What if you could us a standard off-the-shelf computer, load it up with hard drives, and stream video out if it to some sort of box that connects to your home theater system or TV? Wouldn’t that be less expensive?
Enter the Apple TV. The smallish MacMini-looking box simply plugs into your TV, projector or home theater receiver via a single HDMI connector, connects to your network, finds your computer(s) running iTunes that have music and video on them, and Voila, you have yourself a media server system! The Apple TV also has an internal hard drive that can hold media too, so it can store some content autonomously. If you have multiple computers all networked, it can stream media from all of them, so you can consider the total storage capacity of your system as the sum-total of all hard drives in all computers on your network. Nice, huh?
The main point of Apple TV is to play any video or audio on any of your networked computers through your TV or Home Theater system. If you have an integrated whole-house audio system, your computer-stored media can be played throughout your home with several Apple TVs. But the best part, in our opinion, is the user interface....how you deal with all that media from the Apple TV connected to your TV screen. There’s an elegant and simple on-screen menu system that you control with a wireless Shuffle sized remote. The little IR remote has only 6 buttons, 5 for navigation (up, down, left right and select) and a menu button that gets you ‘home’ quickly. All your music, movies, and photos, show up in an easy-to-understand menu that is responsive, and yet quite complete. All media on your network is available (though photos must be “synched” to the Apple TV’s hard drive first), so long as iTunes can play it, so can Apple TV. That lets out a few downloadable video files, though, but if your favorite clip is not playable now, hang in there. Apple TV makes use of Apples Software Update system, and we strongly suspect that updates will expand it’s video format repertoire.
The Down Side…
In our imperfect world, we should learn never to expect perfection from anything or anybody, not even Apple. We were disappointed in Apple TV in several ways. First, the on-board hard drive is, by today’s standards, miniscule. Though twice the size of the drive in the Xbox360, at 40gig, it won’t even hold the content of a single BluRay Disc. HD media is a monster, and clearly Apple TV needs an external drive or server to handle it. That may not be a huge problem, though, since the cost of an entry level computer is almost as low as the Apple TV itself, having a dedicated media server around shouldn’t be a limitation, and provides you with some advantages, like maintaining your library, ripping in new discs, etc. In fact, you have to have a computer around somewhere, because there’s no way to load material to Apple TV directly, it must be downloaded to your computer first, then ‘synched’ to get it on the internal Apple TV drive.
The next limitation is not so much that of Apple TV, but that of the available media. The demo we saw was in an Apple Store, with Apple TV connected to a 42” Sony HD TV. We jumped immediately to the Movies menu, and played a clip from Pirates of the Caribbean. The video quality was, well, unimpressive. But the reason was clear: The clip was encoded for playback on an iPod, so the quality of the video was deliberately reduced so it would fit within the confines of the tiny iPod screen and hard drive.
There is a direct relationship between the size of a media file and the quality of the media. The smaller the file, the lower the quality. And there are differences between one codec and another (the method of encoding and decoding a compressed file). Most content available thru the iTunes store is meant to be played on either a standard definition screen, a physically small computer screen, or a video iPod, where small file sizes are essential. Blowing those media files up to a 42” high definition screen is not pretty. But it’s only a matter of how the media is compressed. The Apple Store “Genius” indicated that Apple is planning for a re-vamp of its available file quality in the iTunes Store in the “very near future”. What’s important is that the Apple TV is not the quality limiting factor.
There are some technical limitations. First, the highest quality video comes via the H.264 codec, one favored by the iTunes Store, with a maximum bit rate of 5Mbps, progressive. This results in a maximum HD resolution of 720p, which is certainly good enough for most viewers, but not anywhere near 1080p. The audio of those H.264 files is AAC-LC compressed at a maximum rate of 160Kbps, not exactly audiophile quality, but quite listenable. This is, no doubt, an effort to keep file sizes to a minimum. However, so far Apple has not made 5.1 channel audio available in downloaded content, even though it’s part of broadcast HDTV standards, DVD standards, and both new HD disc formats. C’mon, Apple, get with the multi-channel program! At present, much of iTunes Store purchased video content is resolution-limited to 640x480, and a lot is 320x240, both of which fall below even standard definition video. Again the cry, “C’mon Apple!”. MPEG4 video jumps up to 720x480, which defines ‘good SD’, not HD. At least audio-only files can be up to 320Kbps AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, AIFF and WAV format files, which will result in pretty good sound, but you won’t buy those from iTumes either, you’ll have to rip them yourself from CDs. But if you do, CDs ripped to AIFF or WAV formats at 44.1KHz, which is a direct bit-for-bit copy of the CD, will also play on Apple TV just fine. No SACD is supported, though. The video pouring out of the output jacks is either 1080i or 720p, which matches all HDTVs, and makes sense since it won’t support 1080p content anyway. If you have a 1080p TV or projector, the scaler in your system should make up for the difference, at least in part. But if you own an older TV without component or HDMI connections, you’ll have now way to connect Apple TV. There are solutions, but Apple TV works best with HDTVs or Extended Def. TVs.
Given the limitations, what do we think of Apple TV?
In short, we LOVE the new Apple TV concept. We had to resist a tremendous urge to yank out our credit card and take one home! But we did, only because at Platinum we embrace new technology, but hardly ever Version 1.0. Apple TV has been available only about 1 month. There’s a lot to do yet, even if you just consider what Apple is already talking about. They are alluding to direct play of Internet video soon, and direct download of content to Apple TV. You also can’t stream photos from your computer, but that’s coming soon too. Unlike its competitors, it CAN play copy-protected content from the iTunes store, but not the same from Microsoft. So there’s work to be done yet.
But at its retail price of $299, you could hardly go very wrong! Our favorite network audio player, the Roku M1000, sold for only $100 less than that, and it is an audio-only device. Also, consider the alternatives: one of the other network media players, each of which has it’s own limitations, connect a computer directly to your TV (you get some advantages at the cost of additional complexity), Microsoft Xbox360 (Plays HD-DVD discs, and can download content directly, though with half the HDD space of Apple TV, and at half again the price) or fork over for a full-out media server at an entry price of $10000 and up. For our money, the Apple TV is a great fit, even with some compromises.
We may be a ways from the fully functional $300 media server, but Apple TV takes a giant step closer. If it matures quickly, and third parties add some needed technical hooks (multi-channel audio, for example) it could capture an iPod-sized market share of the home media server market. We hope it does!
