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analogue SPRINKLES · Feb 12, 2008, 02:02 PM

Originally Posted by Chongo

I went into my BB store and asked if the player I was looking at was a profile 1.0 or 1.1 player. The sales associate look puzzled and as if he had no idea what I was talking about. It appears they have been told to play dumb when asked what profile a player is, so as to sell off the existing profile 1.0 players

I was in BB the other day also and the Mac sales rep was just telling a customer that the MacBook Air had no USB port. I jumped in and told the customer to leave the store and go to the Applestore around the corner infront of the rep.

goMac · Feb 12, 2008, 02:13 PM

AppleTV Take 2 update is now out. The biggest surprise? Apple has added 1080p output.

starman · Feb 12, 2008, 02:39 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

AppleTV Take 2 update is now out. The biggest surprise? Apple has added 1080p output.

WOW!

But I guess it's irrelevant to you, right? I mean, you keep saying that 720p is "good enough".

Shaddim · Feb 12, 2008, 03:11 PM

1080p with an abysmal bitrate, why bother?

starman · Feb 12, 2008, 03:31 PM

Amen to that

jokell82 · Feb 12, 2008, 03:48 PM

Originally Posted by Shaddim

1080p with an abysmal bitrate, why bother?

Since their downloads will be 720p, the bitrate for 1080p videos will be whatever you feed it.

TETENAL · Feb 12, 2008, 03:59 PM

The AppleTV doesn't play movies with 1080 resolution at all, so why do you care about 1080p output? You can as well set it to 720p and let your TV do the upscaling.

goMac · Feb 12, 2008, 04:10 PM

Originally Posted by starman

WOW!

But I guess it's irrelevant to you, right? I mean, you keep saying that 720p is "good enough".

You're right, it's entirely irrelevant to what I said because the AppleTV has 1080p output, not 1080p playback.

jokell82 · Feb 12, 2008, 04:13 PM

Quote from a poster on AVS:

Originally Posted by http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=13090844#post13090844

I'm having great difficulty seeing a difference in 300 (PS3 BD) verses ATV rented HD... An occasional scene will have a bit more softness on ATV, but otherwise I can't see it. In fairness - this movie doesn't have a lot of color contrast... For my money - I'll take ATV for most HD viewing, then use BD for those all time favorites that I watch a lot...

ken

Just some early anecdotal evidence, but it sounds promising to me.

goMac · Feb 12, 2008, 04:18 PM

(I've already had the chance to sit down with a Take Two AppleTV)

The sound quality is much improved. 5.1 is obviously supported, and the intro movie is now in 5.1. Aside from that, I noticed that stereo iTunes TV content sounded much better. Not sure exactly why, it could be that the AppleTV is now providing overall better audio output as a result of it's new 5.1 output code.

The menu system is a little more messy than the old one. One issue is that pulling up a list of content from an iTunes share defaults to just showing all the content in one list instead of separating it by series like the AppleTV 1.0 did by default. Pressing the right button on the remote shifts the list back to the more traditional default view. Still, it's going to be a bit of a pain for the average user.

The store loads extremely fast. I haven't had a chance to rent anything in HD yet.

starman · Feb 12, 2008, 06:39 PM

I'd really like to know if Star Trek: TMP and Star Trek II look good.

jokell82 · Feb 12, 2008, 09:43 PM

More early reports are saying better than cable/satellite and slightly under BD/HD DVD for video quality, and same for audio.

aristotles · Feb 12, 2008, 10:15 PM

Originally Posted by olePigeon

It's still infuriating that the worse of the two formats is going to win.

*sarcasm* Yeah, Blu-ray is horrible. They have more CE (hardware) support, more studio support, more capacity, more bandwidth for potentially higher quality picture and sound, seamless branching and BD-Java which offers the potential of interactive games.

HD DVD on the other hand offers a Toshiba hardware monopoly, only two major studios, less capacity, less bandwidth, no seamless branching support and interactivity based on HTML and Javascript.

But that's not all... thanks to a lack of region enforcement, studios like New Line were delaying HD DVD releases behind Blu-ray and DVD because they were still in the theatres in some countries. *sarcasm*

aristotles · Feb 12, 2008, 10:18 PM

Originally Posted by jokell82

Quote from a poster on AVS:

Just some early anecdotal evidence, but it sounds promising to me.

Uh.... 300 looks like crap on Blu-ray, HD DVD, cable and in the theatre. The grain was intentional. Using 300 as "evidence" is laughable.

jokell82 · Feb 12, 2008, 10:44 PM

Originally Posted by aristotles

Uh.... 300 looks like crap on Blu-ray, HD DVD, cable and in the theatre. The grain was intentional. Using 300 as "evidence" is laughable.

300 looked freaking awesome to me. And notice that I posted other people were getting similar results with other movies...

voodoo · Feb 13, 2008, 06:22 AM

It is nice to return here every now and then to see what delusional theories the HD-DVD supporters cook up to maintain their sanity.

Here's a reality check:

BD will replace DVD
VoD will not replace DVD
VoD will not replace BD
HD in homes will standardize at 1080p
HD-DVD is dead
The HD market is nascent but the video market is not. The former is not separate from the latter.

hyteckit · Feb 13, 2008, 06:31 AM

Less than 10% of current DVD owners care about hidef media. About half of HDTV owners aren't even watching HD content whether it's ATSC, HD cable, HD satellite, and hidef media.

Most people are happy with DVD, even after seeing HD content. Most people are not going to replace their existing DVD collections with hidef media.

Video market is shifting to downloads. Netflix is shifting focus on downloads. Microsoft, AT&T, Apple, and all the movie studios are focusing on movie downloads.

Just as people are willing to trade quality for convenience on the music side, consumers will do the same for video. VOD is just so much more convenient.

voodoo · Feb 13, 2008, 06:39 AM

Originally Posted by hyteckit

Less than 10% of current DVD owners care about hidef media. About half of HDTV owners aren't even watching HD content whether it's ATSC, HD cable, HD satellite, and hidef media.

Most people are happy with DVD, even after seeing HD content. Most people are not going to replace their existing DVD collections with hidef media.

Video market is shifting to downloads. Netflix is shifting focus on downloads. Microsoft, AT&T, Apple, and all the movie studios are focusing on movie downloads.

Just as people are willing to trade quality for convenience on the music side, consumers will do the same for video. VOD is just so much more convenient.

quod erat demonstrandum