It’s a good thing I didn’t buy this thing for HD

Bought mine from the Apple Store this morning, will return the one I ordered when it arrives tomorrow. (No I couldn’t wait)

Played a few clips I encoded with VisualHub and Quicktime, and they played fine.
I streamed them via 102.11G which no problems.

They were over-compressed and I don’t think they were watchable, at least not compared to my Blu-ray Player or even my Xbox360. Of course there was no surround sound. This doesn’t bother me, since I really don’t plan to use it for HD Video.

The problems seem to be caused the max bit-rate, it is just too low. The VisualHug clips looked about the same as the Quicktime clips I also encoded.

I think the trick might be to force 960x540p at the max bit-rate to eliminate the compression artifacts. The 480p content I watched, looked fine, with almost no noticeable artifacts. At this point I prefer the 480p content, without the compression artifacts to the HD with.

I will be interested to see the results after the really encoding geniuses get a chance to do their magic.

Either way I am thrilled, look for my full review soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Apple, HDTV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “It’s a good thing I didn’t buy this thing for HD”

  1. Apple TV: First impressions are in (video not so hot) « Project HTPC says:
    March 22, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    […] Ben Drawbaugh – It’s a good thing I didn’t buy this thing for HD […]