GolfHos

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/9908


 [sm_shock] [sm_shock] [sm_shock]

article fails for not mentioned  bluray 1.0  hardware-- now obsolete.
 8)

I know I have a big time Apple fanboy rep around here but let me be the first to agree with Apple TV's inclusion on that list.  Wrong product at the wrong time with the wrong resolution and wrongly supported.  People want shiny little discs for their movies and they're willing to wait for the re-run or the box set for their TV shows. 

I wanted to get an Apple TV when they had the 160 giggers for a buck 289.  I figured it would be a great poor man's TiVo, that did other stuff.  Bad idea?

I love my Mac, but my son bought the AppleTV box, and it's not that impressive.

He also installed Leopard on one of his laptops, and I'm sticking with Tiger.

What didn't he like about it? (I don't own a Mac yet, so I'm not familiar with what I should expect from an Apple product)

Mac's are great.  AppleTV is a device to stream video from the computer to a TV.  Just didn't turn out to be as great as he expected.

If you buy a new Mac, you'll get Leopard.  I don't see a big enough difference from Tiger to bother with an upgrade.

Apple TV's not a TiVo replacement.  It simply facilitates the streaming of your iTunes library to your TV.  You can't capture a TV show, store it on your Mac or your Apple TV and watch it later at your leisure.  You have to buy the show from ITMS.  It's nice for a few things such piping your iTunes music to your audio system with a typically slick Apple UI but definitely not worth the $$ to me.

Mac geeks might want to give this a look - http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/software/EyeTV/product2.en.html.

This is what I use to pipe my music throughout my household (http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/).  Plug it into electrical outlet and then into receiver.

The Apple TV WAS a great idea and then they quit on it.  It will stream anything that you can place into ITUNES, IPHOTO, and IMOVIE.  There are some items you can make into a quicktime movie, load into ITUNES and stream.  But that is not guaranteed to work.

There's also the Onkyo dock.  Obviously only works if you have an Onkyo receiver.  I imagine other vendors have stuff like that too.

Early days on this yet (not music really but video for sure.)  The digital living room isn't quite a reality.  We discussed storage and backup in another thread.  Until those two, highly related, needs have simple, workable, affordable solutions it will be a niche market.  Apple is working away towards it with ITMS and movies.  They signed a deal with Fox this week.  Rumors about Microsoft taking over the HDM market through downloads persist.  But at the end of the day, how do I own a video library containing 100s of movies in high-res formats without an enterprise storage solution?  We're starting to see promise in products like Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products.aspx) wherein J6P *might* make a run at the technology - but not at that price point. 

Five years.  Maybe three.

Maybe I'm missing the picture here (Lindberg baby)  but what's the large hard drive for?

Are you asking about the Drobo link? 

Standard DVDs are something like 5Gb and HDM is 30-50Gb.  Obviously there are extras, multiple soundtracks, etc. on those but let's say a SD movie is 4Gb and a HD movie is 20Gb.  It's not going to take long to burn through a 400Gb drive especially if you're HD ready.  On top of that you wouldn't want to leave your investment exposed so you're going to want to back it up.  Double the requirement.  For just 50 HDM titles we're going to need a couple of terabytes

If I'm going to have to purchase hundreds/thousands of dollars of hardware to make downloaded movies work they'd better be priced at next to nothing (seriously, maybe even $2-3.)  Given there are only about 100 HDM titles I'd even want to own if they were free, almost everything else I already have on DVD and maybe ten TV series ever are worth owning I just don't see how I break even.  Plus I have to find room for all the hardware, power it, replace it as it ages or capacity is exceeded, so on.  Right now, I wait for a BOGO or end-cap Target sale and store something the width of a pencil in a drawer or two.  That's an order of magnitude better for me.  YMMV.

secure storage/licensing issues aside ,  5 years isn't close to reality for at least 50% of this country, probably 75-80%.  excluding the elite of current FIOS users and those select few who have dedicate Tx lines for running/doing businesses out of their homes, most people couldn't download a true quality HD movie 'on demand in a day!'  to save their life, and the telcos etc  will keep it that way until there's really $ to be made in doing so.  even then, they'll probably downsample/downres the content to cut the bandwidth demands, and j6p will still eat it up
 [sm_disgust] :sad3:   

Now, if they'd let me download and burn...   [sm_devil]

Good point aske.  Bandwidth is another huge hurdle and they will try to beat it through compression/downres which won't appeal at all to the targeted early adopters. 

IIRC (sorry, I'm a bit occupied mentally on real work to actually recrank it or let alone even think about it)    but it would take about a sustained 3Mb/s (Mb, not MB)  running 24hours to get about a 30GB file downloaded.     to stream it in real time would take an initial burst of 20-30x that and a sustained pipe of about 10-15x that .     imagine everyone and their neighbors DL'ing 2-3 movies a week to watch even.
 [sm_shock]

So they'll go SD only such as ITMS supports (actually, only "near-DVD" quality at 640x480).  Apple is currently charging $12.99 for new releases which, on the surface, is cheaper than a hard copy.  But at a couple of GB each (am I right on this ITMS movie buyers???) people will soon have to buy drives to support this purchasing paradigm.

HD crowd won't even blink at it.

But five years is a long time aske.  I think it's possible/likely.