The missus and I enjoy our AppleTV quite a bit. We have it plugged into an older tube TV (with component video plugs) and we use it to watch whatever new series we like that isn’t out on Netflix yet, and to rent movies periodically.
Between the AppleTV and Netflix (and the Watch Instantly feature) we have no need for cable (jerks) or a digital converter box. Oh, I have a digital converter box, but it sucks. I’d rather have snowy reception, or soon none at all.
Itunes has been selling HD content for quite a while now, but since we don’t have an HD television, I don’t really care. We’ll probably get one when the current TV finally dies (it’s 6 years old and going strong – no need to replace it) but I have no interest in getting a BlueRay player or subscribing to some HD cable crap.
I did recently get a giant new monitor for my home computer (thanks to a friend’s company selling off some old equipment for cheap) and I thought I’d like to see if the HD quality was really much different or even “better”.
I purchased the first episode of “Weeds” in HD from iTunes to check it out. We had been wanting to check out the show, and I figured a dramedy might be a good test of impact of HD. HD is usually demonstrated with action sequences, explosions, and space robots. That seems like a cheat to me. The blur of visible action will tend to dazzle at most resolutions – it’s hard to tell if you are responding to the video quality or content.
I was surprised to find out that when you purchase an HD television show from iTunes you actually get two files. You get the HD version of the video plus the standard version. Itunes itself, however, only shows you one item in your library. When iTunes synchs an HD video over to your iPhone or iPod, it will automatically select the SD version. This is so you aren’t wasting a whole gigabyte of space on your portable device for one show. I imagine that it also requires less computing horsepower to play and subsequently scale down an HD file – on a battery operated device like an iPhone that could suck up more juice and shorten the charge time.
In practicality though, it means you lose an extra 300-400 MB of space on your hard drive because you have two files instead of one. It did, however, let me do an apples-to-apples comparison of both versions.
The HD video file (MP4) weighs in at 1.02 GB – the video size being 1280 × 720 pixels (wide screen format), the SD video file is 376.8 MB at 853 × 480. The HD file is almost 3 times the file size of the SD version. The HD resolution is 150% the size of the SD resolution. So, what does that look like?
(click for full size)
Yep. It’s sharper and clearer. I, however, did not enjoy the episode 150% more. At least now I know that when I do get an HD tv I don’t have to waste money on HD content from iTunes.
