Re: apple tv - a lead balloon - iPhone to follow

none wrote:
In article <f2jd66$dkg$1@xxxxxxxx>, nospamatall <nospamatall@xxxxxx>
wrote:

I'd wager that an updated AppleTV box, with a larger hard drive and
additional video output formats will be out soon.
Isn't there some kind of limitation on what they can make playable? I
know the DVD player is separate because of some legal bull***. Maybe
they can't make it play .avi divx etc movies out of the box because of
xome licensing crap?

.avi isn't a format, it's just a "wrapper". as for the others, there are
already plenty of converters to push stuff into the AppleTV. apple will
probably support standards such as AAC and MP4, no need to support
legacy stuff since that's not the direction the industry should go.

Yes I know avi is a wrapper, that's why I included divx and said 'etc'.
I know there are converters, but that isn't going to sell loads of apple
tv's. A lot of people have a lot of either divx or xvid files, to
mention only 2 and ATV can't play them at the moment. It's easy enought
to get them to play in FrontRow but you can't alter anyhting inside the
ATV without voiding your warranty with hardware messing. I was asking
about specific legal reasons Apple might not be able to support these
formats out of the box, so to speak, seeing as they also do not in
QuickTime player.

I know plenty of people with files in 'legacy' formats like those I
mentioned, the legacy argument doesn't fit here like it did with USB,
people need to be able to access what they have already got, regardless
of how fashionable it might be. I know a reasonable amount now about
codecs and conversion, and even so I am not able to get all my
conversions to work in QuickTime. ATV is for people with virtually no
knowledge. It either plays or it doesn't. It is definitely not a simple
process, and the whole codec thing is in such a mess that it will not
become easy either. Conversion of the material itself via re-encoding
might work but that is unacceptable because it incurs a loss in an
already lossy format. Changing the wrapper seems to be a very hit-and
miss thing, unless you are prepared for some geekery. Much easier just
to play the bloody things, like QuickTime can with a couple of add-on
components. I'm just wondering why apple doesn't include them with a
unit that doesn't allow you to add them yourself.

http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/AppleTV/

http://www.xilisoft.com/dvd-to-appletv-converter.html

http://www.mp4converter.net/dvd-to-appletv-converter-win.html

on and on and on...
.

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