February 12th, 2008
Four weeks after Apple announced it at Macworld, it’s finally on my Apple TV at home. There was some initial excitement from breathless HD geeks that the new update enables 1080p output… even though the hardware isn’t capable of it. Turns out that the iTunes Store’s HD content is and will always be 720p, it’s just that the Apple TV is now able to upconvert it to 1080p.
I rented “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (leave me alone, it’s a good movie) to see how well renting HD movies from the iTunes Store works. Once I clicked the “rent in HD” button the movie immediately began downloading, and inside of 2 minutes I was able to start watching it. This is in line with Apple’s claim that on a 6 megabit connection like mine HD downloads will be ready to play in, well, 2 minutes or less. I didn’t have 2 hours to sit through the whole film so it remains to be seen whether my viewing would have caught up to the download and stalled out, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Overall iTunes movie rentals on the Apple TV are far superior to the Amazon Unbox service that we’ve been using on our TiVo HD. The former is nearly instant gratification (decide to rent a movie and be watching it less than 5 minutes later) and is technically HD (although does not look as good as an HD broadcast or an HD DVD or Blu-Ray disc), while the latter would take upwards of an hour until it was ready to start watching and had approximately the picture quality of a good VHS recording.
One thing I’m glad to see is the fact that the Apple TV now shows up in iTunes as an AirTunes client, meaning that from within iTunes I could stream audio to both the Apple TV in the living room and the AirPort Express in the bedroom. Voila, instant whole-house (ahem, apartment) audio distribution. One thing that’s missing though is the ability to control AirTunes distribution from within the Apple TV interface–I’d love to be able to start some music or a podcast on the Apple TV and have it simultaneously play in the bedroom via the AirPort Express, without having to go to the computer and set it up in iTunes. A guy can dream, can’t he?
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