One of the biggest questions surrounding the not-yet-shipping Apple TV is its support of formats other than the MP4 and H.264 codecs officially listed on the tech specs page. One user has suggested a way around the limitation, but is this a diamond in the rough or cubic zirconia?
The trick that user Filmnut came up with is to use QuickTime to make a reference movie to the file you want to watch, and add that reference to iTunes. Think of a reference movie like an alias for the file you want to watch, only one that purports to be a QuickTime MOV as opposed to an AVI, or WMV. In theory, you can then stream the video, regardless of format, from iTunes to your TV.
Will this work? While it’s impossible to know right now, since nobody outside of Apple has an Apple TV, I’d have some concerns. The major question here is whether the decoding of the video stream is done by the computer hosting the file or the Apple TV. If it’s the former, this might work; if it’s the latter, it won’t. It probably won’t work with content that you sync to your Apple TV from iTunes, since the actual video file will remain on your computer. Also, step one of Filmnut’s instructions is “Install some codecs,” but codecs that you install on your Mac won’t help content on the Apple TV, unless, as mentioned above, the decoding is done on the computer.
Filmnut also includes a transcript of a chat with an Apple Store rep, supposedly confirming his theory, but given the amount of vague marketing-speak present therein, I’ll stay in the skeptical category. If you’re thinking about buying an Apple TV based on this info, I’ll advise you to wait until models have hit the streets; then we’ll know for sure whether such trickery is effective. Me, I’m still eyeing the SlingCatcher.
[via Digg]
I was wondering the same thing when they announced the Apple TV last month. I blogged about how to get non-quicktime files into iTunes here.
I'm curious to know if it'll work with the Apple TV. But I"m with you on this one, I'm also considering the SlingCatcher over the Apple TV.
I'm 99% sure that this will fail, because Apple TV simply doesn't play those formats. It doesn't matter if they're in iTunes. iPod is the analog here - you can drag any old QuickTime-playable file into iTunes. But try to drag it onto an iPod, and if it's not compatible... no dice.
Someone's going to have to come up with a clever transcoder that takes Divx files and the like and converts them into MPEG-4 on the fly. That might work.
that's all i'd need to convince me to buy one :D