The Apple TV (2010) Review

True Limits & The App Factor

The original Apple TV had the same limitations as the new one and it didn’t have Netflix support. What made it interesting however was that you could hack the box relatively easily and get it to play anything you wanted, it was a capable Pentium M based PC after all. The move to H.264 crippled the original Apple TV (although you could breathe more life into it with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder card). Its life was cut short in a way similar to what original Xbox owners saw with XBMC once higher quality DivX rips became the norm.

The new Apple TV doesn’t exactly have hardware specs to write home about. It’s A4 based and presumably doesn’t have any more memory bandwidth than the standard A4 you find in an iPad or iPhone.

Zotac ION mini-ITX motherboard (left) vs. Apple TV motherboard (right)

Apple imposes basic limits on what you can play on the Apple TV. H.264, main profile (or lower) and 720p. In practice you can stream 1080p content to the device just fine, it gets downscaled for display of course. I bombarded the Apple TV with a bunch of files that it doesn’t officially support to get an idea of what it can do once hacked.

Bitstreaming Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS shouldn’t be a problem, provided you don’t exceed any bandwidth limitations on the device itself.

The first test in our media streaming suite is a simple high profile (L4.1) m2ts file from a Blu-ray disc. The 1080p 24 fps video ranges between 3 - 14Mbps and it actually played perfectly on the Apple TV. There were no dropped frames and no stuttering.

Other high profile samples didn’t work as well. The bird series from Planet Earth almost all played, but there were serious stuttering issues. It almost seemed like the foreground played smoothly while the background jerked through the scene.

Most bitrates played (with stutter) although at 70Mbps or above the video player would often either crash or the entire Apple TV would reboot.

I believe that if the new Apple TV were hacked to support AC3/DTS passthrough, a good majority of 1080p and 720p H.264 content could be streamed and played by the device. I am concerned by the stuttering issues I noticed on some of the content I threw at the device, but I’m guessing we’ll know soon enough the true limits of the new Apple TV.

Again, it’s worth pointing out that while you’ll have to hack the Apple TV to eventually support all file formats there are many other competing devices that play them natively. None of them have the sleek form factor of the Apple TV, but they also don’t need hacking to work.

The only real advantage a hacked second generation Apple TV would have is the ability to run iOS apps. I suspect that the most useful ones would either use the iPod/iPhone as a controller or be very simple and designed to use the Apple remote. The Apple TV has a lot of potential as a casual gaming box. All Apple would need to do is introduce a gamepad of some sort, open up the Apple TV SDK and get iOS game developers to start porting titles over. We’d obviously have to see an increase in game quality/depth compared to what’s in the App Store today but there’s potential here.

I believe this may be Apple’s road to console gaming. In a few years we’ll have the power of an Xbox 360 in an iPhone. The Apple TV at that point would basically be a legacy console. All Apple needs to do in the interim is court the right game developers.