When is HD not HD?

Quote: "The obvious comparison is to audio; 128kb AAC files sound significantly worse than CDs with complex music and yet Apple has sold literally billions of them. "

On the other hand, they never dared label the iTunes music downloads "High-Fidelity", did they? (well, they almost do, but they don't use the sacred words).

I think that Ou's point is that by more or less abusing the HD notion, they're fooling the consumer and making the video market a little more confusing.

But what can you do when some phone manufacturers/carriers advertise "mobile HD"?

Maybe HD should stand for "higher definition" as in "higher than something lower" (and thus lose all meaning).

Compression is relative though. I have compressed 1080p H264 rips of BBC's Planet Earth and it looks just as good as any Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. However, those are 4.3GB rips per an hour or two. I'm betting Apple / Microsoft's rips are much, much smaller.

Um... wait a sec... AppleTV v2 isn't out yet, so how in hell can he (or anyone else) know that the HD rentals will be too highly compressed to look properly?
Oh, right, he was a fuckass. That explains it.

I completely disagree with Ou's statement that the bit rates Apple is using is too low for good quality HD. While it's true that heavy compression can destroy the quality regardless of the resolution, if Apple is sticking to what they are using for their trailers, then it should look awesome.

To verify this, just look at any of the HD trailers, for example on the Apple website (a good example is Leatherheads). All the 720 trailers are about 4mbps and the 1080 trailers are about 9mbps and they look *awesome*. H.264 is really that good! And yes, I've compared it with broadcast TV on my 46" 1080p TV. You can check it out yourself. When the trailer is playing in Quicktime, click on Window -> Show Movie Inspector. It will tell you the current bit rate of the video playing.

They should really add a blu-ray superdrive into the next version of the Apple TV...

In respect to compressed downloads, please remember that bandwidth is still a limiting factor to some degree. A few people would be happy to wait twice as long to watch a movie they rented via download, but the masses would complain endlessly about how slow it is.

When America's broadband speed levels up then we'll see higher quality video.

A little off topic but.. Am I the only one that thinks Apple could remove the hesitation of whether or not people buy this thing by adding a DVD/Super drive to it? Think about it: Front Row can already handle DVD operation (rather, the old version of Front Row could). But adding the ability to play dvd's allows you to replace a box (your stand alone DVD player) instead of adding, yet another box. Plus, it keeps you from having to chose one method over the other: I'm not gonna replace standard DVD rentals yet because Apple doesn't have all the movies for rent that Netflix (or blockbuster...or whoever you use) will have. So, this allows me both. If I want a movie in HD, I can rent it from the iTunes Store...if I want to watch a movie the iTunes store doesn't have, I'll get it from Netflix and put it in the DVD drive and play it.

If I knew I could add an AppleTV to my home theatre allowing even more entertainment options while replacing one of my components (the dvd player) I'd tell everybody to buy one.

It bugs me a bit when people draw conclusions from comparisons of oranges and pears (no apples here - wanted to avoid the pun).
Just for a second, I'll leave aside the various issues of codec used, compression settings, and so forth, and look at a couple of numbers. Doing a little multiplication, I compare Ou's 3000mbps for 1080p at 60fps compressed to HD DVD max rate 24mbps and get his stated 107:1 compression ratio. Now to the AppleTV at 720p at a reported 24fps (assuming the prior post that some of the iTunes HD rentals run at this rate is accurate) and 4mbps max rate and I get.....a compression ration of 133:1. Now, I'm no compression expert, but I think it unlikely that visual quality falls off a cliff by increasing the compression ratio by ~25%. Sure, I'll bite that the theoretical best visual quality will be somewhat reduced, but the effect seems considerably less than Ou implies, and seems likely to be overwhelmed by the issues I set aside above - namely codec, compression settings, average vs. peak bit rate #s, and so on.

Oh, be wary of anyone throwing numbers around. They're darn troublesome 'cause nobody wants to have to track them all down and figure out how to report them without putting the audience to sleep.

This is what I've been arguing for a while - Apple TV HD may not be as good as a Blu-ray or HD-DVD version but the On-Demand nature of the content delivery overrides the significance of this. Numerous people I have encountered have said that 720p can't hold a candle to 1080p and that the likes of NetFlix will send the discs to me but I honestly don't care. I'd much rather be able to select the movie I want at that time and start watching it, particularly if the image quality is already better than DVD, which I still think is fine. In the same way as audiophiles will continue to prefer CDs (or even audio DVDs) over the likes of iTunes, so HD aficionados will prefer Blu-ray over the likes of iTunes Rentals, XBox and Vudu. But for me this is not so important and therefore convenience will win out and the hi-def format wars look ever more insignificant.

yeah btw where is that apple tv update anyway? I remember Mr. Jobso saying two weeks?