NEW YORK — Tremble, cable: Apple has its sights on you. Tremble, Netflix: Silicon Valley’s brightest is out to get you, too.
The latest incarnation of Apple TV, a white box the size of a hardback book that connects to your TV, is an attractive alternative to the usual ways we get our video content, even if it still has room for improvement.
When it launched in March last year, Apple TV was mainly a way for users to get their iTunes content to play on the TV. You could buy movies on the computer, then transfer them to Apple TV, a slow process and hardly worth it. The movies were expensive and of poor visual quality.
A few months later, Apple Inc. gave the box direct access to YouTube videos, instantly making it more entertaining.
The latest software update, which arrived last week, takes Apple TV to a whole new level: It can now download rented movies directly from iTunes, with no need to involve the home computer. Some of the movies are even in high definition, finally providing a picture that’s a match for our flat-panel sets.
Apple is not alone in offering this kind of device, but it does quite well in the category, even if its box isn’t perfect.
At $229 for the basic model with a 40 gigabyte hard drive, it’s probably the cheapest way to get video from the Internet to the TV. There’s a model with 160 gigabytes of storage for another $100, which you might consider if you plan on buying, rather than renting, a large number of movies.
I rented “The Italian Job” in HD for $3.99 and waited two minutes until a box popped up on my TV to tell me the movie was ready to watch. Apparently, Apple TV deemed that my 10 megabit-per-second cable modem was fast enough for nearly instant gratification. Apple warns that on a low-end DSL connection, you may have to wait eight hours for an HD movie to start.
I hit the “play” button on the tiny but easily mastered remote, and was impressed with the image quality, even on a 46-inch LCD TV. But the movie froze after five minutes of playback, because the download, which was progressing in the background, couldn’t keep up with playback.
It wasn’t a huge problem: Pausing for 15 minutes allowed the box to download enough of the movie to provide the necessary buffer. But when I rented “The Italian Job” on a similar box from Vudu Inc., it started instantly and played without interruption. Apple TV did better when I rented “Ratatouille” in HD (as a new release, it cost $4.99). This time, the download outpaced playback, so the movie didn’t stutter. Apple says this experience should be typical, and that the delay on “The Italian Job” was likely due to the server closest to me not having the movie queued up and ready, which should be a passing problem.
Careful comparisons of frames from “The Italian Job” on Apple TV and Vudu revealed no differences — the architectural details of Venice’s canal-side palazzos came through fine. Both presented the movie in “720p” resolution, slightly lower than the best TV sets are capable of, but substantially better than DVD.
The only visual flaw I could detect was occasional “false contouring,” which is when a field of relatively even color, like a blue sky, breaks into bands of distinct hues. It’s a defect you’ll see in cable and satellite HD transmissions, but hardly on Blu-ray discs.
So the HD quality is good, but Apple TV has only 81 movies available in that resolution, with the goal of having 100 available at the end of February. The other 280 movies (goal is 900 at the end of the month) are nominally in DVD resolution, but they look mushier. My main complaint when Apple TV launched last year was that movies bought through iTunes may look good on an iPod, but they look terrible when blown up on an HDTV. The new standard-definition rental movies are provided with HD sets in mind and are watchable, but Vudu delivers SD movies that are indistinguishable from DVDs, and it has a much larger library of 5,000 movies.
Purely as a video jukebox, the $295 Vudu is a better choice. Apart from the previously mentioned advantages, its interface is easier to navigate than Apple TV’s. Vudu even provides some older movies for free, and it’s not all B-movies either: You can bone up on movie history with “Nosferatu” from 1922. But Vudu doesn’t connect to your PC at all, whereas Apple TV can play your music and show your photos.
Another alternative is Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 game console, which does pretty much everything Apple TV does, including HD rentals, and plays games as well. But its interface is an eyesore, and it’s loud and bulky, not the thing you want running in the entertainment center when playing a quiet, thoughtful movie.
Microsoft’s hardware partners also make Extenders for Windows Media Center, which match Apple TV’s abilities when it comes to showing content from the PC on the TV. They can show video from some online rental services, but these fall short of both Xbox Live and Apple TV when it comes to image quality and ease of use.
Some TiVo Inc. digital video recorders can be used to rent movies from Amazon.com Inc., but there is no HD content available.
The main downside to all of these devices, including Apple TV, isn’t the technology. It’s the terms Hollywood imposes on downloaded rental movies. Once you start playing a movie, you have to finish it in 24 hours. If you don’t, you have to pony up the whole rental fee again just to finish it.
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