New iTV (Not final name)

M

MacFreak

Chic Not Geek
Its about time!!!

HDMI and more.. Awesome!!!

It looks like this {a flatter Mini} it's called iTV. That's a codeword. we need to come up with a better name. Interface is like next gen front row 1/2 size of Mac Mini, built-in power supply, USB, Ethernet, 802.11 "wireless component video", optical audio and HDMI ports, plus old RCA stereo audio ports. Works with Apple Remote Like a Mac Mini... iTV is its name (not final).

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Well they've guaranteed a sell to me. I'm just now in the HDTV market and this will work perfectly.

My only complaint from today's announcements are that 640x480 isn't going to cut it in the long run. It's fine to start out with and will still look quite good at a distance, but 1080P is the future, hell even 720P is way better than 640x480. IN short, it will look way better than SD, but nowhere near as good as it could.
 
Sounds sweet, I'll prolly buy a HDTV in january so i'd definitely get an iTV. Once again problem is quality. 640 is great yeah but i'd much prefer 720P which we'll have to wait on. I hope its soon.
 
When it comes out for sale I am definitely getting one. One more way I think Apple should integrate their iPods is the in card DVD player setup. If you could play the iPod movies in this setup it would great.
 
I doubt they'd use HDMI if it didn't support HD. You should be able to pump HD data (should be 5-20mbps) over 802.11g in real time, and if even an iPod can handle SD H.264, it shouldn't be too hard to process HD H.264 in a set-top box.

But I didn't watch the event. Did he specifically say no HD?
 
Ok, right about the HDMI, but where is Apple expecting you to get HD video (720P or better) to run through the iTV? (Since iTunes won't get it to you).

Or maybe they're just planning ahead.
 
I believe full HD is supported but not sure( HD trailer playing from apple.com to your tv). But my problem with quality is the movies you download from the ITMS. Its only 640...if you stream that to your TV and then stretch it on a 42 or 50 inch plasama its probably not that great.

Should have been full HD support and a built in video resizer to resize videos specifically for your ipod. This way your tv gets good quality and you don't kill space on your ipod.
 
I'll use my MacBook instead, thank you. Connects to my video beamer just fine, and even with iTV, my MacBook would still have to be running and provide the movie. FrontRow works fine on my MacBook - and things look gorgeous on the beamer. But I guess there _is_ a market for this. Desktop computer users mostly, of course.
 
Where's the TV tuner and the optical drive? :p Without those, the device is pretty useless unless you buy all your music and movies from iTunes.
 
I noticed they just said 802.11 networking, not 802.11g in the stream of the event. I think they think they'll be using 802.11n by then, so new Airports probably in the works as well. I don't think you'd get good performance with g since it already can't play an avi video without crapping out, at least in my experience.
 
The thing has optical audio out so it supports Dolby 5.1 or better which is great. I guess the movies they sell on the store are going to be Dolby Digital.
 
mindbend said:
IN short, it will look way better than SD, but nowhere near as good as it could.
Click to expand...

will it? standard def is 768x576 (PAL), so I'd say it would look about the same, perhaps even slightly worse.

looks great, but I still plan on buying a Mac Mini instead, because I don't want to have my iMac on and doing nothing just to stream video to my TV.
 
True, the specs for SD may indicate something better, but we all know that in reality American (digital) SD is a horrific mpeg-2 transmission, which won't hold up nearly as well as h264 or even a nicely compressed mpeg4.

I watched last season of Lost on my 20" iMAc (dragged it into the bedroom like a TV). From about 8-10 ft away, even 320x240 looked surprisingly decent. I was really surprised by how watchable it was. In some ways it was better than digital cable thanks to cleaner compression, but obviously the 320x240 held it back. But keep in mind also that average old-school NTSC TV won't show you anywhere near all of those SD lines, so in that sense 640x480 on an LCD will be noticeably better than SD on an older TV.
 
Does anyone know the deal with the 640x480 resolution in terms of the widescreen format. I see they have widescreen formatted movies (Gone in 60 secs) as well as 4:3 (Good Will Hunting).

So what is going on there in terms of resolution? Are they cropping the widescreen version or are they doing an anamorphic conversion? I don't feel like burning money right now just to find out, but I'm tempted.

At a quick glance the Gone in 60 secs trailer looked slightly more pixelated (i.e. cropped) than the Good Will Hunting trailer, but I may just be kidding myself.

This is obviously important in that people should know if the widescreen format version is really more like 640x375 or something as opposed to a stretched 640x480.
 
mindbend said:
Does anyone know the deal with the 640x480 resolution in terms of the widescreen format. I see they have widescreen formatted movies (Gone in 60 secs) as well as 4:3 (Good Will Hunting).

So what is going on there in terms of resolution? Are they cropping the widescreen version or are they doing an anamorphic conversion? I don't feel like burning money right now just to find out, but I'm tempted.
Click to expand...
I've wondered this myself. All I can say is that the mp4 format certainly supports stretching, just like DVDs.

It's also possible that widescreen movies will be wider than 640, merely hovering around 640x480=307,200 pixels. Old video iPods could support wider content as long as the overall area size was close to the standards Apple published. So a 16:9 movie could actually be 720x400, or even slightly larger.

Apple didn't take advantage of this flexibility before, but then, they didn't have any real reason to, either. Before, the intent was more to watch them on iPods; that's no longer the case.
 
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