A couple days ago I wrote about Apple TV Take 2 and how it might very well kill BluRay (in my world HD-DVD is all but dead due to recent announcements). Alex wrote in the comments that we won’t see anything take over the HD market until broadband speeds up quite a bit. As I thought about it Alex was both right and wrong.
Assuming 90 minutes at 4Mbps we’re looking at a 2.5GB file. Can you imagine moving 2.5GB down your current broadband connection and not pulling out your hair? I can’t. The servers on Apple’s side (Akamai I assume) need to be able to take a great deal of load if the service gets popular with little to no slowdowns on their side. My local ISP has to be able to take the traffic and not slow down at all (which is doubtful since I have a feeling that my local Comcast over subscribed their network). There are a lot of pieces controlled by a lot of people that have to fall in to place just to get a video that will start quickly and not stutter if it’s in a progressive download mode. And even then we’re looking at a much lower quality video than what I can get on BluRay.
I own a 1080p HDTV and the best Apple TV can output is 720p (for those who argue 1080i is better please see here). I accept that in favor of not having to drive in the -40 degree weather here in Minnesota. You know, the kind of cold that seeps through windows, causes cars to not start and is deadly if you’re out in it to long. I want to be able to download movies, podcasts and television shows right then and there in the comfort of my 72 degree home. Why do I need a round shiny disc to play video? That’s so 90’s! The answer may be as simple and bandwidth. If I don’t have enough bandwidth for a smooth experience, I’ll end right back up on discs.
We won’t know for sure how Apple TV Take 2 performs until Apple releases the software update in the wild. I hope it works well with quick access to video start times, easy skipping around the media and decent file management. I also hope that telcos start realizing that investing in their Internet infrastructure will help them in the long run, not hurt them. Bandwidth rich applications push people to order more bandwidth, not QoS enabled bandwidth. Maybe someday they will understand this. Maybe the Apple TV will work as expected. Maybe it will all miserably fail. The future of Apple TV is, unfortunately, in the hands of the ISPs. I eagerly await my Apple TV update and hope that in it I see the death of BluRay.
The best thing about the
AppleTV
is that it’s a High Definition iTunes extender. Apple was smart enough to
forgo the older EDTV/SDTV standards and went with 720p/24 HDTV. The bad
thing is that it’s really hard to find HD content in the iTunes Store.
Sure you can get your 480p EDTV movies and TV episodes, but why can’t I get
HD? There are some HDTV podcasts but they are very hard to sort and sift
through to get to the 720p versions.
Until now.
AppleTVSource.com
offers a list of HD podcasts broken down by category that are specifically
designed to work on your AppleTV. No longer will you have to download a
videocast which was designed for an iPod but is now playing back on your
beautiful HDTV (yuck)! There are over 100 channels to choose from
including the
Technology
Evangelist 720p HD videocast.
If you don’t have an AppleTV I would highly suggest it. While the AppleTV
is missing a few features I would like to see, all in all it’s a great product
that can change your TV viewing experience.
AppleTVSource.com
just makes the AppleTV experience so much nicer.
Recently Apple sent out a newsletter to videocasters explaining how to optimize their videos for the Apple TV. A lot of it was pretty basic stuff but one section in particular caught my eye. Apple suggests only encoding for the highest resolution iPod and says that’s good enough for Apple TV. I don’t think so, and frankly I think Apple needs to overhaul their device support for online video.
The thought process behind Apple’s suggestion is very sound. If a videocaster creates two versions of the same video, one for iPods and one for Apple TV, they they split the users up between the two formats. Rather than having one format with 5000 users you end up with two feeds of 2500 users each. Apple likes to feature popular videocasts on the front of the iTunes store’s Podcasting section and if you only have 2500 viewers then you may have to double your viewership just to get mentioned (these are made up numbers for the sake of my example). Getting promoted on other sites will be harder too since it will look like your videos are less popular than they really are. The second problem is that some users, like myself, have both the iPod and Apple TV. Which feed should I subscribe to? Having multiple feeds can be confusing to end-users, waters down the popularity of the videos themselves and becomes much harder to manage. This is all true.
iPod video is only 1/2 the lines of resolution that the highest quality Apple TV video can be played at, assuming 16:9 content. On the iPod we’re looking at 640×360 videos while on the Apple TV we can have 1280×720 video. You can imagine how much worse a 360 line video looks than a 720 line video being that 360 is under DVD quality and edging on VHS quality. This makes Apple’s solution less than ideal. As a content creator I not only want to make it easy for my end-users to get the videos, but I also want to show off my material in the highest quality possible.
The solution to this problem is not the responsibility of the videocaster. Apple needs to step up and change the way video is done across all devices so that they match, or they need to change how iTunes deals with video.
Lets first try changing all devices. Apple should update the iPod to include the same hardware h.264 decoder that the Apple TV has. Now an iPod can have 1280×720 playback of video which would allow us to discontinue our iPod feed and go straight to a 720p feed. The same video that plays on a video iPod would play on an Apple TV. The other advantage of this is that now my iPod is HD ready so with an iPod to HDMI adapter cable I should be able to plug directly in to my HDTV and get audio and video in 720p. The disadvantage of this is that 720p is not the holy grail of online video. 1080p is pretty clearly where the iPod and Apple TV need to be. How does Apple deal with this in the future? Update the iPod and Apple TV hardware to support 1080p? What about all the users of the old hardware that only have 720p support? Do we end up with two feeds again? I’m not sure this is the most ideal solution, but it’s better than having devices with different resolutions completely.
The second option Apple has is to change the way that iTunes works with video. Right now Technology Evangelist is working with about six different video feeds: 480p (iPod), 720p (Apple TV), 1080p, 3G phone, PSP and Zune. Imagine being able to drop everything but the 1080p video feed and have iTunes compress the video on-the-fly to the format that it needs. One feed from Technology Evangelist could drive any portable media player that works with iTunes, any media extender that works with iTunes and any local computer playback would be in the highest quality possible. The problem here is recompression time. Right now all iTunes has to do is move the file from your computer to the device you want to play it on. In this new model not only will iTunes have to move the file, but it will have to recompress it as well. The recompression can take ages. That’s where Cringely’s idea of hardware h.264 encoders in every Macintosh comes into play. Offload the h.264 onto a hardware chip so it can recompress the video in real-time or faster. Take that 1080p file and create an optimized iPod, Apple TV and computer playback version and we end up with a very powerful solution. We’re left with a distribution problem of online video being 1080p, but that’s for another article. What about Windows users, what do they do in this scenario?
Maybe there’s a better way to do RSS feeds? No idea, but I do know that what we have right now is broken and someone like Apple needs to step up and fix it.
QuickTime is an amazing architecture. Mac OS X bases its media foundation on QuickTime and QuickTime is used in many digital cameras, portable devices and web sites. So why then doesn’t Apple TV support some of the most basic functions that QuickTime has to offer?
When we create our daily Podcasts here at Technology Evangelist we make two versions: standard MP3 and advanced AAC. The enhanced file allows us to insert chapter marks, URLs and images into the audio file which will show up in iTunes, QuickTime and on iPods but not on Apple TV. Sprite elements in videos such as identification bugs, closed caption data and URLs will either prevent the media from moving to Apple TV or it simply won’t play. When enhanced AAC files are moved to the Apple TV I can see the pictures, but no chapter marks seem to work and I get no additional details on URLs. If I stream that very same file to the Apple TV rather than playing it back locally, I don’t even get the pictures. All of these things work just fine in the QuickTime player on Mac or PC, just not on an Apple TV. Why?
Being that Apple TV is based on Mac OS X I would assume that the core video playback is based on QuickTime. This should allow simple things like chapters, closed captioning and sprites to work just fine, but they don’t. What is it about the Apple TV that prevents this data from working? While having an iTunes extender is nice, being able to take advantage of Media 2.0’s interactive abilities would be even nicer.
I think there’s an assumption that Apple TV needs to be super easy to use. Rather than give the consumer a large complicated remote Apple chose to stick with the rather crummy remote that it includes with its computers and iPods. The problem is that this limits what the Apple TV can do from the couch. I don’t have a CC button to turn on closed captions. I don’t have a chapter advance button. Heck, I can’t even control my volume from the remote (oddly enough there is a button for that though).
Why did Apple decide to prevent me from doing what I would consider basic functions? I wonder how many content providers actually take the time to add chapters to their streams? How many add Closed Captions? Heck, how many Podcasts can you find that are shot in 720p or better and distributed specifically for the Apple TV? Does it make sense for Apple to add these features in to the Apple TV or should they worry more about getting additional HD content online and making the Apple TV so easy my Grandmother can use it?
I wonder if the fault lies with Apple or with us, the content producers. If we create more and more dynamic, engaging and compeling stories that have chapters, closed captions, embedded URLs and other webish features, will Apple release a firmware upgrade to Apple TV to bring this functionalty up to the front of the box? What would it take to bring Apple TV into the Media 2.0 world?
QuickTime is an amazing architecture. Mac OS X bases its media foundation on QuickTime and QuickTime is used in many digital cameras, portable devices and web sites. So why then doesn’t Apple TV support some of the most basic functions that QuickTime has to offer?
When we create our daily Podcasts here at Technology Evangelist we make two versions: standard MP3 and advanced AAC. The enhanced file allows us to insert chapter marks, URLs and images into the audio file which will show up in iTunes, QuickTime and on iPods but not on Apple TV. Sprite elements in videos such as identification bugs, closed caption data and URLs will either prevent the media from moving to Apple TV or it simply won’t play. When enhanced AAC files are moved to the Apple TV I can see the pictures, but no chapter marks seem to work and I get no additional details on URLs. If I stream that very same file to the Apple TV rather than playing it back locally, I don’t even get the pictures. All of these things work just fine in the QuickTime player on Mac or PC, just not on an Apple TV. Why?
Being that Apple TV is based on Mac OS X I would assume that the core video playback is based on QuickTime. This should allow simple things like chapters, closed captioning and sprites to work just fine, but they don’t. What is it about the Apple TV that prevents this data from working? While having an iTunes extender is nice, being able to take advantage of Media 2.0’s interactive abilities would be even nicer.
I think there’s an assumption that Apple TV needs to be super easy to use. Rather than give the consumer a large complicated remote Apple chose to stick with the rather crummy remote that it includes with its computers and iPods. The problem is that this limits what the Apple TV can do from the couch. I don’t have a CC button to turn on closed captions. I don’t have a chapter advance button. Heck, I can’t even control my volume from the remote (oddly enough there is a button for that though).
Why did Apple decide to prevent me from doing what I would consider basic functions? I wonder how many content providers actually take the time to add chapters to their streams? How many add Closed Captions? Heck, how many Podcasts can you find that are shot in 720p or better and distributed specifically for the Apple TV? Does it make sense for Apple to add these features in to the Apple TV or should they worry more about getting additional HD content online and making the Apple TV so easy my Grandmother can use it?
I wonder if the fault lies with Apple or with us, the content producers. If we create more and more dynamic, engaging and compeling stories that have chapters, closed captions, embedded URLs and other webish features, will Apple release a firmware upgrade to Apple TV to bring this functionalty up to the front of the box? What would it take to bring Apple TV into the Media 2.0 world?
QuickTime is an amazing architecture. Mac OS X bases its media foundation on QuickTime and QuickTime is used in many digital cameras, portable devices and web sites. So why then doesn’t Apple TV support some of the most basic functions that QuickTime has to offer?
When we create our daily Podcasts here at Technology Evangelist we make two versions: standard MP3 and advanced AAC. The enhanced file allows us to insert chapter marks, URLs and images into the audio file which will show up in iTunes, QuickTime and on iPods but not on Apple TV. Sprite elements in videos such as identification bugs, closed caption data and URLs will either prevent the media from moving to Apple TV or it simply won’t play. When enhanced AAC files are moved to the Apple TV I can see the pictures, but no chapter marks seem to work and I get no additional details on URLs. If I stream that very same file to the Apple TV rather than playing it back locally, I don’t even get the pictures. All of these things work just fine in the QuickTime player on Mac or PC, just not on an Apple TV. Why?
Being that Apple TV is based on Mac OS X I would assume that the core video playback is based on QuickTime. This should allow simple things like chapters, closed captioning and sprites to work just fine, but they don’t. What is it about the Apple TV that prevents this data from working? While having an iTunes extender is nice, being able to take advantage of Media 2.0’s interactive abilities would be even nicer.
I think there’s an assumption that Apple TV needs to be super easy to use. Rather than give the consumer a large complicated remote Apple chose to stick with the rather crummy remote that it includes with its computers and iPods. The problem is that this limits what the Apple TV can do from the couch. I don’t have a CC button to turn on closed captions. I don’t have a chapter advance button. Heck, I can’t even control my volume from the remote (oddly enough there is a button for that though).
Why did Apple decide to prevent me from doing what I would consider basic functions? I wonder how many content providers actually take the time to add chapters to their streams? How many add Closed Captions? Heck, how many Podcasts can you find that are shot in 720p or better and distributed specifically for the Apple TV? Does it make sense for Apple to add these features in to the Apple TV or should they worry more about getting additional HD content online and making the Apple TV so easy my Grandmother can use it?
I wonder if the fault lies with Apple or with us, the content producers. If we create more and more dynamic, engaging and compeling stories that have chapters, closed captions, embedded URLs and other webish features, will Apple release a firmware upgrade to Apple TV to bring this functionalty up to the front of the box? What would it take to bring Apple TV into the Media 2.0 world?
Apple TV is out and it is set up for native HD, but what about those who only have a standard definition monitor? All hope is not lost. There is a way to hook up an Apple TV to some standard definition monitors, but there are some drawbacks. Benjamin walks us thru the process.
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When the Apple TV came out I rushed to buy one. Technology Evangelist
shoots all our videos in 1080p and distributes 480p, 720p and 1080p versions of
our material. On paper it looked like our stuff would work, but you never
know until you try, right? To my delight everything worked as it should
and I was able to see our material in all it’s 720p glory. After watching
the content a bit I noticed a few areas we could improve in our encoding, so I
set out to create new encoding profiles. Since the Apple TV supports the
h.264 main profile using CAVLC I figured I would use that. Turns out that
Apple TV does not seem to like CAVLC so much.
So what the heck is CAVLC and why do we care? CAVLC and CABAC are methods
of encoding video using the h.264 CODEC that allows for lossless
compression. Apple TV does not support CABAC so I’ll ignore that for the
sake of this article. CAVLC stands for Context-Adaptive Variable
Length Encoding and is part of the main and high profiles in h.264. There
are many profiles but we basically concentrate on three: baseline, main
and high. Baseline is the entry level profile designed for low end
encoding for things like cell phones, or devices without hardware supported
rendering (I’m generalizing here). Until now we have been forced to use
baseline h.264 profiles since the iPod didn’t support anything higher than
that. The second one, main profile is a step up and allows us to select
longer GOP structures (how many real frames vs. virtual frames we use) as well
as CAVLC or CABAC encoding. Main profile is basically for broadcast TV and
slightly higher-end applications allowing for more complex decoding of the file.
And then high profile takes it a step further and allows things like color space
(4:2:0, 4:2:2, etc) and is designed more for broadcast archiving of files or
really high-quality video at higher bitrates. When I read that Apple TV
supported main profile CAVLC I was excited because now I would be able to update
my encoding presets to take advantage of what the higher profile had to
offer. Since CAVLC is a lossless compression technique I was hoping I
could get a little more quality out of our videos at the same or maybe less
bitrate. Things like solid blacks were breaking up before, I thought this
may fix it. CAVLC looks great, but it has some pretty serious problems on
the Apple TV.
Our original videos have all been encoded up to this point using Sorenson
Squeeze 4.5 as an h.264 baseline profile. I have wanted to upgrade to the
main profile CAVLC but Squeeze isn’t very good at actually setting that
up. Recently we purchased Telestream’s Episode Pro to help improve our
workflow, get Apple iPod and Sony PSP support as well as give us more CODEC
options. I ran a couple of test encodes using Episode Pro as an MPEG 4
h.264 main profile CAVLC encode and the files looked stunning. I was
excited to try these on the Apple TV so I added them to my iTunes library.
They all popped over to the Apple TV no problem. I then went to my Apple
TV, selected the first file, and the whole unit stalled. After about 60 to
90 seconds the Apple TV responded again and I could move to the next video in
the list or play the CAVLC encoded file. If I hit play then I would have
to wait another 60 to 90 seconds before the file would begin to play. Once
it started playing everything seemed to work fine, and it looked stunning.
The problem is that I can’t have our content causing everyone’s Apple TV to
stall out every time they pass over a clip! If I take that exact same clip
and don’t change any settings other than moving it to a baseline profile, then
it will work fine on the Apple TV. Nice and snappy.
I heard rumors that the new QuickTime Export to Apple TV feature used CAVLC to
encode, but I have no way to test and see how it’s really encoding yet. I
ran a test encode and content that spits out of QuickTime Pro is nice and snappy
as well, so I’ll assume that they are using a baseline profile. Has anyone
else seen this problem or have any ideas how I can troubleshoot something of
this nature? I posted to the Apple support forum, but that has gone
unanswered. I want to be able to deliver our content to everyone using the
least amount of bandwidth at the highest possible quality. Anything I can
do to improve upon the videos is welcome, but having the video lock the Apple TV
for a minute or two is not an acceptable solution.
If you would like to see exactly what I’m talking about, I have uploaded our
test clips to the MoveDigital network. You can download each clip (there
are multiple clip settings for b-frames, bitrate, etc) at:
http://www.movedigital.com/go/benjaminhigginbotham/58340.
The first video in there is a baseline video which should work, the rest are all
main profile CAVLC. Right now I just need to determine if it’s an Apple TV
issue or Telestream’s implementation of h.264 that’s causing the problem.
If anyone is able to re-compress the videos and try a CAVLC encode, it would be
greatly appreciated.
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