Focus on Apple TV

This is some information on Apple's HDTV bridging product, for conveying certain content to your home television.

How it works: Content arrives on the Apple TV via ethernet cable or wireless. You then use an HDMI cable to connect directly to your HDTV, or connect to an audio-video receiver. The receiver method is far more desirable, whereby it sends the program's video to your HDTV over HDMI, and amplified audio to your room speakers. If you simply connected directly to your HDTV you would experience a much diminished listening experience, and really miss out on the immersion experience that a good sound system can provide.

Apple provides an on-screen menu for selecting input, which can come from your local Macintosh, or from a variety of sources on the Internet, where iTunes is the primary source for commercial content, augmented by YouTube and a growing world of video podcasts. In the beginning, the menu was very limited, but has been progressively growing, as Apple has worked with a growing number of providers such as Netflix, Vimeo, HBO, MLB, etc. to add "channels" in the form of specialized apps which Apple has helped the providers create.

The apps running in Apple TV are specialized. Apple TV does not run apps in general, and there is no App Store choice in its menu system. (I think we all expect that to change in the future.)

Generations

The fundamental constants in all the generations are HDMI, ethernet, and wireless communication with the Apple TV. Distinguishing characteristics of the generations:
  1. Alumninum enclosure, with a hard drive. This was during the days of limited broadband and relatively slow 802.11b wifi, such that it was sensible to gradually accumulate content on the device for later viewing. Cabled connections: component video, and HDMI. It could also stream, which established the method used by later generations. The box was run by a stripped-down Mac OS X.
  2. Much more compact black plastic box, no hard drive, streaming only, max 720p. To achieve the smaller size, the component video connectors were eliminated, such that cabled video input was only HDMI. These black Apple TV units are run by a version of iOS.
  3. Same size, but improved capabilities to enable 1080p. 80211n wireless.

About Dolby Digital sound

If you search the web, you will find numerous questions about getting surround sound out of an Apple TV — and a tremendous amount of speculation and misinformation. The basic difficulty encountered is feeding movie content to the Apple TV and getting only stereo sound on the front two speakers. People then resort to all kinds of cabling rearrangements and changing of settings, to no avail. The reality is that Apple TV does surround sound just fine — "it just works". Connect an HDMI cable between your Apple TV and your A/V receiver, set the receiver for direct input ("Straight") , and you get surround sound from appropriate content. (In Apple TV Settings > Audio & Video, choose "Dolby Digital: Auto".) There is no need for an optical digital cable: the HDMI cable carries full video and audio. The key here is "appropriate content". It's easy to believe that content going into your Apple TV has the right audio to achive surround sound. The reality is that a great deal of such content is stereo only. Movies may be in surround sound, but movie trailers are essentially all stereo. You can verify this in iTunes on a computer by going into your Movies section, do Get Info on one, click on the Summary tab, and inspect the Channels value: if it doesn't say "Stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1", then you're not going to get surround sound from that program. (Other possible values are: "Mono", "Stereo", "Multi" — which is multi channel sound but not Dolby, so will reproduce as just stereo.)

Apple TV and renting movies from iTunes

You can rent movies from the Apple TV Movies section, or you can rent movies from your computer's iTunes Movies section. If you rent from iTunes, the movie is downloaded to your computer (expect a 1080p movie to take about 1/2 hour to download via today's broadband). This gives you the advantage of transfering the movie to watch later on your iPad or iPhone or iPod touch; and you can watch the movie by choosing your computer within Apple TV, where it shows up under Rentals. If you rent it on Apple TV, you cannot transfer the movie to other devices, and to watch it you will stream it from Apple, real time, over the Internet.

When browsing the Movies choices in Apple TV, be aware that there may not be a Dolby symbol for the movie's sound, but if you examine the movie in iTunes you find that the details will say that it is Dolby Digital 5.1.

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