Meador Manor

Apple TV (160 GB Model) at Amazon

For the past year my Apple TV has been a great tool for watching and listening to the plethora of podcasts that keep me entertained. And it has been fun to occasionally play some music on it from my sizable and fully legal iTunes library, watch a few dumb YouTube videos on it, and even download some videos from the internet and convert them for playback on the Apple TV. But I was never, ever, tempted to buy a movie from Apple. Recently all Apple TVs were upgraded with the capability to rent, not buy, regular and high-definition movies. And that feature has finally made the Apple TV a device the masses should enjoy.

I took advantage of a day off from work, due to an ice storm, to rent Ratatouille as a $5 high-def movie on my Apple TV. Selecting, downloading, and playing the movie was simple and rewarding. The movie downloaded fairly quickly, was sharp and clear, and showed only minor compression artifacts. It was a far better experience than struggling to hook up my laptop computer to the television for the Netflix Watch Instantly service, which has lousy picture quality and often streams poorly. It was also simpler to access than the Amazon Unbox service on my Tivo, with better picture quality.

The downside to this sort of rental is that you only have 30 days after downloading a movie to start watching it and only 24 hours to finish watching it after you start. So I still greatly prefer an actual DVD disc from Netflix since I can take as long as I want to view it, plus the disc often has fun extra features like commentaries. In fact, I’ve kept the Ratatouille disc in my Netflix queue because I now want to hear a commentary and see some extra features.

But sometimes I want a quick, fun movie that hasn’t shown up in the mailbox from my 5-disc-at-a-time Netflix queue. Whenever that occurs, my preferred alternatives are now:

• rent it in high-def on the Apple TV
• rent it in reg-def on the Apple TV
• rent it from Amazon Unbox on my Tivo
• rent it as a DVD disc from my local Hastings video store
• watch it using Netflix Watch Instantly

Overall, Netflix is still indispensable with its fantastic selection of feature-laden DVDs and user-friendly policies. But it lacks the near-instant gratification of Apple TV movie rentals, and Netflix’s Watch Instantly service simply is not competitive. If Apple TV eventually offers enough high-def rental choices, I may very well reduce my Netflix disc plan back to 3-discs-at-a-time.

I think my next experiment will be to rent a regular-definition Apple TV movie for playback with a fun Rifftrax. All of this sure beats cable TV!

HD DVD is dead, so my Toshiba HD DVD player now makes a good doorstop. I’ve enjoyed a few high-definition movies from Netflix with the player, but now Netflix is phasing out their few HD DVD discs. I want to take full advantage of my HD television, but in the end I’ve wasted $200 on the player and another $130 on the first season of remastered Star Trek: The Original Series discs. Some folks say to not bother with high-definition discs and instead rely upon downloaded movies, but their advice is flawed. Movie downloads lack the feature commentaries I adore and so-called high-definition movie downloads look little better than a standard DVD on my HDTV. Blu-ray discs from Netflix are the smart way to enjoy true high-definition movies and their features. So now I need to put good money after bad and buy a Blu-ray player (and, given my love of Trek, probably buy the Blu-ray version of that first season after it is released).

My income is limited, so I’ll have to spend some of my federal tax ripoff refund to buy a Blu-ray player. All of the pundits say I should buy a Sony Playstation 3. The problem with Blu-ray is that until recently it was not as advanced as HD DVD, lacking the picture-in-picture commentaries feature I’ve enjoyed on the Star Trek discs. So what they call “Profile 1.1” was recently released to add more interactivity. Old stand-alone Blu-ray players could not be updated with this feature, but Sony has updated their Playstation 3 with that capability. Now Sony claims it will add “BD Live/Profile 2.0” capability to the Playstation 3 in late 2008, allowing movie studios to upload fresh content to your player when you watch a disc.

The technology folks I trust at CNET say the Playstation 3 is a safe bet and point out that you get a game system as well as a Blu-ray player for your money. But Sony, in its typically stupid and arrogant way, uses only Bluetooth to control the Playstation 3. Its lack of standard infrared remote control for disc playback means it won’t work with my treasured Logitech Harmony remote unless I hook up a kludge. And I’ve never had much interest in video games: Ms. Pac-Man is about my limit for arcade play and I tired of Myst-style and SimCity-style gaming long ago. The kicker is that the cheapest Playstation 3 costs much more than I already spent on my HD DVD player and discs, combined.

So maybe I’ll save my refund money for awhile and buy a stand-alone Blu-ray Profile 2.0 player in late 2008. But that is a long time to be without high-definition movies and Sony could keep updating the Blu-ray specification in a scheme of planned obsolescence for stand-alone players. My personal tipping point will likely be when CBS Digital releases the remastered second and third seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-ray. I doubt I’ll be able to hold off for long after that.