Apple "Showtime" Event

Bergamot

You're kidding, right?

Bergamot

Oh, and as far as the b/g thing goes, Apple was one of the first supporters of 802.11g, and it's been years since they shipped anything with 802.11b, let alone a bandwidth-hungry device.

Minisweeper

Not at all. The itunes downloads are only 480p (though i have issues with that too) but surely the unit will play other files? If theyre making a unit which cant cope with (although it has the necessary connections) HD media then they might aswell just bin it now. There are already rumours in the media industry of companies looking toward uHDTV.

Minisweeper

hmm. Release price of $299 so i'm guessing £199 uk. Not bad. I think i'd rather save the cash and get a mini, though.

Bergamot

Well back to what I said before, if a feature length 480p movie takes 30 minutes to download over broadband, they can easily squeeze out 4x the data over a home wifi network, which would be plenty for HD video.

Mark

That assumes that the little box has a hard drive or some ram to hold the video. My old airport express dropped the audio connection to my speakers constantly. I'm hoping they don't repeat that mistake. I'm finding that iTunes 7 is pretty ugly unless you downloaded your music from their store. My entire music library doesn't have any album artwork since it was all ripped from my cds. I used their "Get Album Artwork" function, but it didn't get anything. I hope someone comes up with a slick service to get all album artwork. Otherwise their fancy artwork flipping menu will be useless to me.

Bergamot

iTunes 7 is frickin gloomy. We've done a total 360, and are now back to ugly battleship grey.

And why can't I use any of the fancy views on my ipod music?

Minisweeper

It depends on the encoding and actual quality of the video and audio sources. Regardless of what they think they can transmit a 480p feed in, true 1080p (high def) video has a bitrate of ~60Mbit/sec under standard mpeg 4 compression. Where the 802.11g standard is running at a theoretical maximum 54Mbit/sec (i do realise there are wimax and various other technologies which promise 108Mbit/sec but I didnt notice apple say anything about it) it'd fall short of the necessary transmission capability. Clearly theyre planning to either a) force users who wish to use a HDV stream to use ethernet (as my existing wireless media centre does) or b) use higher compression methods or lower quality sources (both seem to defeat the point of going HD to begin with). Nontheless, for £200 it's definitely worth looking at. I paid £150 for my WMC and if both products were available now and i had neither I think i'd almost certainly be willing to pay the extra £50 for the apple offering.

Bergamot

h.264 gets much better compression ratios than MPEG4, at similar quality levels.

giginger

What I really want is folders on my 4th gen iPod navigation. That doesn't appear to be happening.

I have a folder called Mark Bell. Within that folder are all the albums he's done. I want that in my playlists so that I can go Mark Bell -> Sheath a lot quicker than scrolling through shitloads of artists. Am I missing something or is that not possible?

As for the iTV (The name of a TV station here in the UK), it looks pretty half assed right now. It had best be supporting N spec wireless or you're going to end up with some streaming problems. G should stream video fine but it doesn't.
I was really hoping for something awesome today and I can't help but be dissapointed. Hell, I don't even own a Mac but I was hoping for a wicked Mini (not sweeper, sorry) update that would finally push me into getting one.

c-unit

The iPod's pretty cool - sales for those are gonna go CRAZY now and over Christmas. I was hoping for a new cinema display though.

Minisweeper

I hadnt noticed before how small the new shuffle is. That's crazy. Would be awesome if they put a screen on the back or gave it an LCD remote.