<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br><br>Nope, it's done it from day 1. Now, if you're talking about 1080p...
<br>no. The AppleTV can't do that. Technically, 720p is HD. And for<br>reference... I can't really tell much difference between 720p and<br>1080p. 1080i... that sucks (I'm one of those lucky chaps who's<br>
susceptible to the flicker inherent in it)<br><br>Quicktime has had an "Export to Apple TV" function that allows 720p<br>for several months now. It plays back at 24fps, which is movie frame<br>rates. It's quite nice actually... and yes, it's H264.
<br>_______________________________________________</blockquote><div><br><br>To be perfectly pedantic, 720p24 isn't really HD. Check out the product page for the AppleTV at the Apple store, and the only mention of "high definition" is in reference to the fact that it can be hooked up to an HDTV.
<br><br>As for the possibility of using Quicktime to produce AppleTV ready 720p24 video, be prepared to jump through hoops and twiddle your thumbs, because Quicktime won't accept MPEG-2 as an input format, and encoding 720p24
h.264 video takes some serious computational power. I recently tested out the Quicktime AppleTV 720p conversion with some 720p60 DVCPROHD video I had shot - on a 8-core 3Ghz MacPro is *still* took 90 seconds for every minute of video to transcode.
<br><br>So yes, it is kind of cool that an AppleTV will play 720p24 h.264 video, but until they at least start selling video in that format, it seems kind of pointless because it still requires a real mac (or similar) to produce the video. (Sidebar: more than just a real Mac is needed, it has to be an intel Mac - my
1.83Ghz Macbook encodes NTSC h.264 video more than twice as quickly as our 2Ghz dual core G5 powermacs).<br><br>That said, I'm still considering setting up my backend to transcode to AppleTV spec video so I can access my recordings through FrontRow on my macbook.
<br> <br> <br></div><br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>TV/IT Engineer<br>WCJB-TV Gainesville, FL<br>(352) 377 2020 x248<br><a href="mailto:cribe@wcjb.com">cribe@wcjb.com</a>