Apple TV’s offering of television shows and movies appears
as a matrix of small images arrayed across your TV screen. I decided to take
the plunge and try one out by clicking the Apple remote’s Down and Right buttons
until the show I wanted to watch was highlighted, then by pressing the Select
button.
After about 30 seconds of watching the Loading… message, my TV
show appeared, but I was horrified with the image quality, far worse than the
old Standard Definition TV we used to watch (now known affectionately in my
home as “fuzzy-vision”). So I quickly switched to another show and experienced
the same horribly fuzzy picture. No matter which TV show I selected, my Apple
TV delivered an impossible-to-watch picture. Was this the end of my adventure?
What I needed to know (as later explained by my tech-savvy kid)
was that, when you start watching a program on Apple TV, the computer inside
the hockey puck is figuring out what you have for Internet bandwidth – starting
from “you have such pitiful Internet service all we can give you is a fuzzy
picture” to “hey, this is looking pretty good, so we’ll crank up the video resolution
to optimize your viewing experience.” Translated, this means if you can hang in
there for another minute or so, you’re likely to see a step-by-step improvement
in the picture quality.
Sure enough, after a half-minute or so, the picture was much
improved, but not what I had come to expect as high-definition TV. Another few
minutes of watching didn’t help. Apparently, the Apple TV had decided that my
7Mbps wifi connection was sufficient to deliver good (but not great) picture
quality.
While doing some online research into the problem, I discovered
that some Apple TV users had experienced better picture quality by replacing
their wireless (wifi) connection with a “hard-wired” connection to the hockey
puck device – theory being that some speed is lost in a wireless connection to
the Internet. So I purchased a new cable (called an “Ethernet” cable), plugged
one end into a previously unnoticed port on my Apple TV and the other into the router
FairPoint had installed in my basement. Gratefully, this took me up another
notch in picture quality, but still not to “great.”
Mentioning my frustration to the tech-savvy kid, I was told
that any twenty-something person knows how to hack an Apple TV to force it
into great picture quality mode regardless of the bandwidth available. I
followed his instructions for holding one button down for three seconds, then
pressing another button 4 times in sequence, then holding two other buttons
down simultaneously.
(To be continued…)
PS: If you’d like to read a serious review of Apple TV, try
this: http://www.cnet.com/products/apple-tv-2012/
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