Movies purchased from the iTunes Store look quite good using the Apple TV—certainly as good as most DVDs you’d play on your TV. True, Apple sells movies with a resolution no higher than 640 by 480—which is well below the HD mark—but withhold judgment until you see for yourself how the movies and TV shows look on screen. I viewed Cars and both Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and while some subtle artifacts were visible in dark-to-gray passages, the movies looked remarkably good. I ripped several movies in HandBrake—including the aforementioned It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and House of Flying Daggers , as well as The 40-Year-Old Virgin , and Neil Young: Heart of Gold —as 720 by x (where x is the height of the video the wide-screen version resolved to—somewhere around 300 pixels, usually) MPEG-4 files at 2,500 Kbps, and they looked every bit as good as watching them from the original discs.
On the other hand, if you have video at low resolutions—for example, the 320-by-240 TV shows once sold through the iTunes Store—it’s going to look blocky on your TV, just as it would if you played it from a 5G iPod connected to your TV.
While watching Heart of Gold, I particularly missed the kind of 5.1 channel surround sound you get from today’s DVDs. Currently, the Apple TV plays only stereo Dolby Pro Logic audio, even if you feed it movies that carry a 5.1 soundtrack. My colleague Dan Frakes reports that the audio chip within the Apple TV is capable of playing 7.1 channel audio, so the stereo limitation appears to be software-based only. My hope is that Apple will switch on broader audio capabilities in a future software update.
On the other hand, if you have video at low resolutions—for example, the 320-by-240 TV shows once sold through the iTunes Store—it’s going to look blocky on your TV, just as it would if you played it from a 5G iPod connected to your TV.
While watching Heart of Gold, I particularly missed the kind of 5.1 channel surround sound you get from today’s DVDs. Currently, the Apple TV plays only stereo Dolby Pro Logic audio, even if you feed it movies that carry a 5.1 soundtrack. My colleague Dan Frakes reports that the audio chip within the Apple TV is capable of playing 7.1 channel audio, so the stereo limitation appears to be software-based only. My hope is that Apple will switch on broader audio capabilities in a future software update.
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