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Apple TV Lands in Korea, But May Not Fly

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 9:40 AM - by

Apple officially launched its Apple TV home theater appliance in Korea earlier this week, according to the Korea Herald. But without support for iTunes TV and movie downloads, it may have trouble succeeding.

One of the selling features of Apple TV is the ability to display shows downloaded from the iTunes Store on wide screen televisions instead of smaller computer displays. That feature alone may keep Apple TV from selling well in Korea since Apple does not offer its iTunes movie download service in the country.

Instead, users will have to first copy movies to their computer, taking away from the simplicity of using an Apple TV. If users want to stream commercially produced DVD discs to an Apple TV, they will also have to use additional applications designed to bypass the built-in copy protection - something many users may not know how to do.

Whether or not Apple TV proves to be a success in Korea remains to be seen, but with the limited functionality the device offers outside of the United States, it may be difficult for Apple's media appliance to get a foothold.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed May 09, 2007 10:18 am

And the same is applicable to every other country in the world apart from the USA. For now it's interesting to see if Video podcasts are a big enough pull to fill the void of commercial content.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed May 09, 2007 5:45 pm

I guess I am wondering why there isn't a cable that goes from your ipod to the TV in HDMI? They made a regular A/V video conversion cable, but you have to buy a $200 box to have it display in HD? Seems like it shouldn't be hard, DVRs are essentially a hard drive with video files in HD.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 12:36 am

Guest wrote:
I guess I am wondering why there isn't a cable that goes from your ipod to the TV in HDMI? They made a regular A/V video conversion cable, but you have to buy a $200 box to have it display in HD? Seems like it shouldn't be hard, DVRs are essentially a hard drive with video files in HD.

Maybe you should look up the technical aspects. They're quite daunting. It would require a much faster processor, for one thing. My 1.25 gHz iMac G4 can't decode all 720p videos in real time: some hitch and stutter. 640x480 has 3 MP; 1080x720 (HD) has over 7 MP. The processor must handle more than twice as much data in the same time.

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deasys said:

member since 08 Apr 2003 with 296 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 3:13 am

The excellent freeware Handbrake has reduced the process of converting DVDs to disk files compatible with Apple TV to just 3 clicks. It does a great job of the conversion and is done in reasonable time on Intel-based Macs.

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LaurieF said:

member since 15 Jun 2001 with 3547 posts, TMO Forum Mod, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 10, 2007 6:20 am

I'm putting off buying one for quite a while, if not ever, because New Zealand will be one of the last places to get videos from the iTunes store.

It's quite a good idea, but so far as far as I'm concerned it's an elegant solution in search of a problem.

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A guest said: (hide)

Mon May 21, 2007 5:16 pm

Well If You Want To Stream DVD Discs On Apple TV Download FREE HandBreak.

It Imports DVDs To avi,mp4 (iTunes video) and some others

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