Apple TV still sucks!

It still can’t achieve 1080p HD quality, and only achieves 720p HD and 480i SD by skimping on bitrate. It uses MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264), lol! I mean, guys, it’s all about SMPTE 421M (VC-1) these days. And 4 or 5 bucks to download a file with a 24-hour viewing window? No thanks, even if it were HD. $2 gets you Blu-ray at Blockbuster with no late fees. And $20 gets me all the HD-DVDs I’ve got time for in a month via snail mail from NetFlix. Yeah, I was an early adopter of HD-DVD. I don’t care if it dies and I have to buy Blu-ray soon. HD anything is the only way to use my Sony Bravia to full effect. I’ve gotten ever dollar’s worth of all 350 I spent on my Toshiba player. Upscaling SD DVD players look lame. HD-DVD looks amazing. And Blu-ray is just a touch better still when encoded properly. It’s the best image I’ve seen outside of an editing bay or shooting studio. Ever see HDCAM SR with 4:4:4 color space on a 1:1 pixel HD-SDI mointor? Or else an HD-SDI tap straight off the chip block of a RED ONE camera on a JVC DT-V24L1DU lcd monitor? How about a 4k image stream with about five times the image quality of 1080p HD? I’ve seen these things. They make you drool and wet your pants simultaneously. It’s as if the Ziegfeld did IMAX. It makes HD-DVD and Blu-ray look cheap. It’s like watching VHS once you’ve seen Digital Betacam. Hopefully Bayer compression with wavelet transforms will replace DCT one day, once the hardware can keep up and not cost a fortune. It’s DCT versus DWT for now, but DWT is sure to win in the future. Still, HD-DVD is noticeably better than cable or on-demand HD, which has way too much compression applied for my taste. But even cable’s overly compressed HD kicks Apple TV’s ass when it comes to image quality. And neither can promise zero packet loss, so I’m sticking with optical discs instead of wires for now, ’cause Blu-ray and HD-DVD releases have been QC’d up the wazoo. Apple is becoming the greedy big brother it once rebelled against. But with its newspeak TV ads and hip product design, the sheep stay fooled: “cable tv bad, Apple TV good!” Pay more for less. $1 is too much for .mp3, drm or no, btw! Especially when there’s free p2p content at higher bitrates to be had. When are they gonna start pricing media by the byte? Because once that happens, flat-rate per month access is next, imho. Just look at the telecoms and voice calls for an example. That’s why the telecoms are drooling over video delivery: they can return to the per-call pricing model. Apple has always been good at turning cachet into cash. Who knew the hipsters could be fooled by a black mock turtleneck?

It’s not a tumor

It’s not a recession, it’s a slowdown. It’s not negative growth, it’s lower positive growth.