Apple TV and the BBC. Big push immanent?

I've seen a bunch of links of how to add streaming radio stations to the Apple TV Take 2. Here's one with some very straight forward instructions.

Sounds cool but I'd like a way to stream other audio sources, like Real Player. While I dislike Real content mostly, no, pretty much entirely because of the desktop player, I'm dependant on it since that is the primary format for listening to BBC radio content. The BBC now have audio podcasts of a lot of their popular shows but the bulk of their content are only available using Real. With all the openness and innovation at the BBC, what with their new AJAX customizable home page and interactive programming I'd like to see more, dare I say contemporary options to consume their content. The BBC has always been very technology forward. How many other TV stations designed, manufactured and retailed their own personal computer?


On a related topic I did see that the BBC was in talks to distribute shows on iTunes like a lot of other major networks. They are also in talks to distribute legal, paid downloads over Bittorrent via corporate face of Azerues, Zeudo. Hopefully we won't see the international restrictions on viewing and buying this content as we did with the BBC desktop client iPlayer. It's annoying to visit a BBC site and not be able to see promotional trailers of a TV show simply because you don't have a UK IP address. The BBC did trial the idea of video podcasts and hopefully this will be a way that they can fill out their selection of shows.


Is the Apple TV even available in the UK yet? Hopefully it doesn't debut with the same lack luster performance as the iPhone.

How to convert video for the Apple TV

How am I going to put my own videos on the Apple TV? This the question I asked myself from day one with the device.

Here are the specs of video that the Apple TV supports. OK. My plan? Try to copy stuff over and see what works. Not very scientific, I know. For my tests I move video into the iTunes library and hope that it plays back. This may not always be the case.

The first thing I noticed was that all the videos ended up in the Movies section of iTunes and therefore the Apple TV. It would be handy not to mix home movies with my purchased or rented films but I guess that's OK. A separate section based on your other iLife apps that output video would be cool to have.

Essentially I wanted to copy iMovie home videos of my daughter over to the device. She loves watching herself. I found that many of the videos that I'd converted to .mp4 encoding for upload to video sharing sites like Videoegg and YouTube worked straight away. They were pretty low quality however when viewed on the big screen. Some other formats like .dv did not play automatically and some .mov exports who's settings I'd tweaked also didn't play well.

So how do I convert movies for the Apple TV? I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question so I start looking around for ways to make convert my .dv or .avi files, the highest quality files I'd saved. I wanted convert them into the ideal, Apple approved format of .m4v.

I'd barely laid my hands on a Google search when immediately I'm greeted with the application called VisualHub. It's a very well regarded app with a 'sassy' interface and extremely large number of features. . For the oddly symmetrical price of $23.32 it's not a bad deal.

What else is out there? Handbrake is a great free, all in one converter of DVD video files that has a version specifically for the Apple TV .m4v file format. Unfortunately that release, 0.9.2, is only compatible with Leopard, Mac OS 10.5, which isn't an upgrade I've made at home yet.

The best converter I stumbled over, which I should have guessed was an option all along, was iTunes itself. If a video plays in iTunes I just need to right click or control-click on the file and choose convert to Apple TV. Excellent. I especially liked the fact that if the video was already in a format that the Apple TV could play, whether it was an .m4v or not, then iTunes let me know that I didn't need to convert it at all.

What if iTunes doesn't recognize the video format in the first place? Well I had an alert for one video that I needed to install a video codec listed on the Apple TV. The application I've settled on, for the time being at least, to be my one stop shop for converting content is Quicktime Pro. I bought quicktime pro for a number of small home projects and I was delighted to see that there was an export option for the Apple TV .m4v format. The export format happily had no options to choose from. No frame rates, no dimensions, nothing. Just press the button and wait. Trust in the process in other words.


The only hassle with the method that I've settled on however is the speed. On a G5 a forty minute video takes around one hour and twenty minutes to convert. On my G4 it takes so long I've never stuck with a conversion before bailing. I'm tempted to invest in this little piece of hardware and software from Elgato, the Turbo.264. It's a USB device that performs the bulk of the video conversion task and therefore takes the load of the computers CPU. The manufacturer notes that on a G4 system there are reports of a 10x speed gain. This might be well worth the $89.

I'm going to keep checking into other options as they present themselves. I'm sure that I'll keep having more videos to test with.

Trying out the TV downloads

So ... the question soon became what shall we watch first on the Apple TV? Good question. We opted for a TV show. We're big fans of box sets of TV shows. So much so that we'll wait for an entire season of a show to go by so we can watch the episodes back to back on DVD. We usually buy the DVD's rather than rent so we thought that we'd get a season of something on iTunes. After redeeming a few gift cards my wife opted for the first season of The Tudors, the Showtime original season depicting the early life of King Henry VIII. Cool. I love me some pre-Renaissance monarchs!

Here's my first question ... maybe I'm missing something but why is there no TV show rental? Why only movies? Although we usually buy TV shows I'm sure most people would prefer to rent them. TV shows are usually more or less disposable. You wouldn't want to watch the episodes over and over again. Rental would make sense for seasons of TV shows.

Our other issue with buying the TV season is how does iTunes decide which order that the shows download in? After connecting the Apple TV to our iTunes account and starting the download a show was ready for us to start to watch. It hadn't downloaded but it was playable. Trickplay is the term I've heard used. So you'd expect this to be episode one right? Nope. Four. Followed by ten and then nine after the ATV tentatively toyed with five.

So we decided to go to bed rather than wait for all the downloads to happen. When I got up the next day I checked the status and all the shows had downloaded and I was informed that episode one was ready to watch. So episode one had been the last episode to download. Sweet. Thanks iTunes.

How was the quality? Great. Not high def but very good. It was a little weird though. We're used to the video compression on Tivos and our DirecTV DVR but the Apple TV had a certain flavor that was different. Things like water ripple never looks great in digital video but there were certain quirks with how the picture was rendered on the screen. The biggest issue was with the color red. Large areas of anything red seemed to vibrate and have rough, jaggy edges in a frame that is otherwise perfectly rendered. This is fine except one of the main characters in the show, played by Sam Neil is Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey dresses almost consistently in bright red Cardinal robes. His outfit seems to float three inches in front of the TV screen.

Gotta try some other content. Next up ... photos maybe.