Goodbye Apple TV
April 9, 2007 by Tom
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Well, after only a week or so of ownership, I’ve decided to toss in the towel and take my Apple TV back to the Apple Store. I don’t want to give the wrong impression though - I think this is an awesome device. For 99% of iTunes users I think it’s a great investment. Music, movies, podcasts, and now tons of hacks to add more functionality are showing up. I was focused on movies though.
One of my main goals for my ideal media center was to be able to archive my DVD collection. Changing discs is a pain, plus I’m stuck watching 5 minutes of FBI warnings and previews from the film company before the damn movie even starts! So I’ve ripped a good portion of my collection to my hard drive which helps, but there is no elegant way to play Video_TS folders in OS X. There’s a few hacks and workarounds, but nothing as seamless as Front Row’s interface. Plus, I still have to navigate the crappy menus all the studios put on there. Along comes AppleTV and I picked one because I thought it could solve my problem. I could convert all my DVDs to h.264 encoded mp4 files and AppleTV would be able to pull up all my movies on an HDTV! Right? Sorta. This works great if you don’t care about the quality of video and/or sound.
The current implementation of Handbrake that I checked out from the SVN and built my own copy of seems to work well enough until I drive the quality of the .mp4 up too high. If I encode at something higher than 3000 kbps for the video bitrate, I notice a distinct stuttering in the video and the sound does not appear in sync at various points. Anything under 3000 kbps plays fine, but that’s on the low end of what I like to encode movies at. Unfortunately, this was a show stopper for me, especially since my iMac would play the exact same videos perfectly. This led me to believe that the Apple TV’s hardware doesn’t seem to be able to handle real high quality video.
On that note, it doesn’t support any decent forms of surround sound either. Thankfully, the developers of Handbrake are nearly done adding a feature that will downmix a 5.1 AC-3 stream to a Dolby Pro Logic II 5.0 stream to accompany the movies we encode.
So what does it all mean? The Apple TV isn’t going to cut it for me so it’s going back to the store. I’ll be picking up a Mac Mini after the next time they bump up the specs and using that as my media center at home since it should be much more capable of handling high quality video and audio. I’ll be able to output video at 1080p via DVI rather than the 720p the Apple TV was capped at. And hey, if Leopard supports Blu-Ray discs, I know I can get my optical drive upgraded and have a killer machine for myself.
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