smoketetsuo | Apple's New Stuff Yesterday and What It Means To Me.... (Reply)

Yesterday Apple announced the iPad 3 and new AppleTV with 1080p support. My two cents on this are they of course sound good but I of course wont be in line for them. Well, I can't afford them for starters.. well the Apple TV maybe since it's still $99 and I can upgrade my family to it but it would be for them. Not for me so it doesn't affect me much.

However

I have been encoding our HD videos to 720p and only a handful do I have in 1080p to watch on my computer. Well since the AppleTV can now handle 1080p I can for those videos just keep the 1080p version and not have two versions one for 720p and one for 1080p any more. The only thing I am not sure about is if they have improved DTS support.

On the AppleTV my family has now I have to encode the videos to M4V format and that container format didn't seem to want to accept DTS so I have been having to transcode the soundtracks to those movies to Dolby Digital (AC3). I don't know if this has been changed... although with being able to handle 1080p it probably can now handle HD MKV files which can take DTS. If so that means I can consolidate those too to just the DTS versions rather than having two versions there too. In a way 1080p support is kind of a waste for my parents because they just have a 720p TV and watch it from pretty far away. It'd be more for my convenience being able to do more 1080p rips and not having to bother to also do a 720p one.

Handbrake needs to come out with a 1080p AppleTV video encoding preset.

So simplifying my life when it comes to encoding HD videos for sharing with my family would be a benefit of the new AppleTV for me. So I may upgrade them perhaps next month when I have enough money.

The iPad however is too expensive or me and I probably wouldn't use it as much. When I'm at home I don't tend to use portable devices much like my Hackbook laptop or my iPod. I mostly just use the iPod when I'm going for a walk or in the car. How the new iPad will benefit me though is raising the bar for graphics and perhaps gameplay on the iPad device so when the makers of those games port them to the Mac there wont be as big a disparity between the quality of graphics on those and full fledged titles ported from the PC. This would improve the quality of gaming on those ports.

I had a thought on them saying it's more powerful than an Xbox though. And that's great but to put it in perspective many AAA games aren't running even at a full 720p on the Xbox any more for performance reasons. So being more powerful than that doesn't mean a whole lot and doesn't necessarily mean it'll be able to run all the games at a full 2k retina resolution which is almost the same resolution as on my 27 inch iMac. On a computer you need a strong hot GPU with a lot of VRAM to drive the latest games at that native resolution so I don't know if the new iPad can manage that with its most demanding games.

On the other hand you can't choose your resolution there and games are probably just set to how they perform best on the previous pad and the developer always decides and most people don't notice so it probably doesn't matter.

I'm waiting for them to announce the new next gen 27+ inch iMacs now with retina display which since it's at least twice as big as an iPad display could be 4k resolution or something. :P Now THAT would need a really strong GPU to run games at that native resolution especially the latest ones with all the effects and antialiasing.