*ahem* Actually… the ATV2 will play 1080p videos, though it will only output to 720p. And only if the bitrate isn't too extreme. And it supports higher bitrates than you'd think. I have one… lesse… a 7GB movie that actually plays flawlessly at a bitrate of 8883 Kbps at 720p. Well to be honest I've only watched about 15 minutes into it, but watching the streaming progress bar and the ATV just manages to cache ahead of the stream.
But, cache isn't playability, just means how much it's been able to cache and/or scale to attempt to play - also unless you did a fixed bitrate, it may have not gotten to content that was the max bit rate, or max for any length of time.
And, yes, I'll agree I made a mistake in words there - it will play 1080p content at a low enough bitrate at 720p, but it won't play it at 1080p which is what I was intending to reference.
lifeisabeach said:
But anywho… the point I'm leading up to is that these are largely limitations to the hardware, not simply being "Apple's way". And most people are overly hung up on 1080p vs 720p. At a viewing distance of 8 feet, the human eye cannot resolve the additional detail of 1080p over 720p unless they have at least a 50" set.
Which, since I have a samsung 67", I do fall into that range - if I had a 40" or lower I wouldn't even be making a fuss or worrying about it at all.
lifeisabeach said:
Of course bitrates have an effect too, as does the quality of the source material. Apple's videos actually do look better than a 720p video ripped off a Blu-Ray because they are getting their media from a source well in excess of 1080p. The higher the quality is of the source material… the better a downsized version of it will be.
Although this is normally true, I have seen some that haven't been nearly as well encoded as others.
lifeisabeach said:
We decided to stop buying Blu-Ray movies and stick to iTunes rentals. For what Blu-Rays cost, and as unlikely we'd watch anything in particular more than once or twice, it just isn't practical to buy and the iTunes rentals look much better than people who judge solely by the specs give them credit for.
I want to do that for some things (actually I want to do that for my satellite first - get rid of our sat and get season passes), but w/ only a 3 meg link, it takes forever to download a video and I've had it download, go watch something else while it was downloading (from my iTunes) then go back to watch the downloading movie and it had to start over again which makes it hard to just rent movies on the ATV itself for us.
I suppose it would be possible to rent on the computer then feed it to the ATV2, I know that you have to "transfer" the license from the iTunes computer to the ATV2, but I don't know if it would then have to start the entire download procedure over again, and I haven't wanted to try...
lifeisabeach said:
It doesn't sound like you are wirelessly streaming your videos. Certainly not with 30 Mbps media.
Depends on how you define streaming. But, what I was doing over WiFi was when I had mostly 2-15 Mbps content from a network share. Anything higher then that I stored locally on my mini. Eventually I ran cat5e over to that portion of the house and with a gigabit network, I was able to place my high bitrate movies on the network share (I found it easier to deal with a wired network in the living room that way since I have several devices that needed network access in once single place - and it left more bandwidth on the wifi for things like my iPhone, laptop, iPad, etc.)
lifeisabeach said:
I had constant problems streaming, even with the hardware decoding-supported Plex. Battlestar Galactica, for ex., transcoded to h.264 in an MKV container with the original DTS track and each episode coming in a bit over a gig or so in size… some episodes were constantly pausing so the stream could catch up. Same videos… remuxed to m4v with the DTS track downmixed to AC3… no issues in Front Row. At all. Defragging my media drive helped a lot for the more problematic ones, but it persisted to a lesser extent and I finally had enough. I had no issues if I played directly off the Mac mini, but I didn't have the drive space to store all my stuff on it and didn't want to put an external drive out there. If cost were no object, I'd go back to using Plex on a Mac mini with an attached 4-drive RAID box and just have Blu-Rays ripped and left as-is in all their glory on that.
Hmm, that's interesting - I wonder why BSG was giving such grief - unless it was your WiFi (what is it anyway? G? N?) since as you mentioned you had no problems with the mini with direct storage...