Boohoo, I want a (better) AppleTV
I blogged about the AppleTV back in the day. My idea of using digicam clips instead of miniDV still stands, although since then I purchased an HDV camcorder so it makes sense to try to make use of it. Now that I can export real progressive 1080p videos out of my HDV 1080i camera I need a device that can manage 10 Mbps 1080p h.264 files. Unfortunately, the Quicktime engine is extremely slow playing back files created by the x264 encoder instead of Apple’s own encoder — no matter how you encode the file (with CABAC or CAVLC). So not only the AppleTV must be fixed to work better with h.264 but it must add support for 1080p too — currently it can go only up to 720/24p and iTunes will REFUSE to upload to the device a 720/30p file even if it was carefully encoded with less than 5Mbps which is AppleTV’s maximum bitrate. 1080p playback would probably mean that a hardware decoder must be used. 250 GBs of disk and ability to add DivX/WMV plugins wouldn’t hurt either. Give me that for $400 and I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Update: And apparently AppleTV will refuse to work via an HDMI switcher that has no support for content locking (most cheap ones don’t).