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March 23, 2007

hardware

Stop the presses, the Apple TV does SD

Posted Mar. 23, ’07, 5:27 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware

480i My bad, I took Mossberg’s word as gospel. I suspect he was taking Apple’s word for gospel when he said:

There are some drawbacks to Apple TV. It won’t work with most older TV sets, the square kind that aren’t capable of handling widescreen programming. And it works only with TVs that have the newer types of connectors, such as “component” jacks, and the new HDMI cables being used on most high-definition TVs. It works best with high-definition TVs, and it puts out video in high-definition resolutions. But it will also work with “enhanced definition” widescreen sets.

Well, it turns out, you don’t need a widescreen or HDTV. Paul Kafasis, CEO and Chief Lackey of Rogue Amoeba as well as fellow Massachusetts resident, hooked his up to his standard definition television and even took a photo to show the 480i aka standard definition output option. (It seems Steve himself is unaware of this fact.)

How cool is that? You don’t need a fancy, pretty, life-changing High-Defintion television to enjoy your iTunes content on your TV. Many older televisions have component inputs (such as my old CRT).


6 Comments

thomas Fitzgerald said:

Your TV will still need to have a widescreen option to display 16:9 content even if it is not a 16:9 screen, otherwise the output of the apple tv will appear vertically stretched.

March 23, 2007 6:28 AM
Dave said:

Your "old" CRT must not be that old. Component inputs on standard def TVs certainly weren't common before a few years ago (they may have been available earlier, but they weren't common).

March 23, 2007 6:41 AM
George said:

It's nice to know that Apple didn't complete forget those who don't have and can't afford to purchase a widescreen TV. My TV does have component video input (but sadly only 1) which is currently being used for the DVD player.

It makes me slightly more interested in the AppleTV, but for the most part I'm content with my current iTunes viewing solution of just using my iPod and a video cable. Watching a video isn't the sort of spur of the moment activity as listening to a particular, so I'm fine with the minute or so it might take to set up the TV and iPod (if I would just break down and spring for an iPod Dock, it would be a bit easier). Plus, I've got too many DVD's to bother ripping for AppleTV viewing. If I decide to watch Titanic, I've decided to set aside 3 hours of my life so an extra 2 minutes to find and load the DVD isn't going to sway my mind. And it'll look and sound better.

March 23, 2007 7:00 AM
Jack said:

looking around the tubes it seems to be hit or miss whether a particular tv will work.

In other news, looking around the tubes, gizmodo has that the hard drive is swappable for a larger capacity, and look on dig for guys who have installed perian and ssh to get xvid to work.

This thing is going to be fun.

March 23, 2007 9:11 AM
DHP said:

funny - I installed mine last night and only see 480p as lowest resolution. Maybe because I was using HDMI cable? I wonder if above was taken because the hookup was component cables?

March 23, 2007 9:29 AM
Fletcher said:

It's been a bit of a rollercoaster with each new revelation of what TVs the thing will support. It seems insanely silly that all the standard definition iTunes videos can't be played back on a standard definition television. I do have component inputs on my newish Philips standard definition square TV, but still probably can't bring myself to actually buy one of these things.

Mostly, I don't have the hard disk space for television shows. At 500MB a pop for hour long dramas it really is not viable to store these things on my laptop for very long. I can put them on an external hard drive, or burn them to DVD, but then I could just buy the DVD instead and get special features.

March 23, 2007 9:54 AM

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