Cutting The Cord - Part 3

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/