The total revenue number in Home Media has been going down year over year as long as I’ve been watching it (according to the Digital Entertainment Group), and Blu-ray was just one of many attempts to stop the bleeding (down 2% in 2011 compared to 2010). The reality is  the total spending on digital in 2011 was about a third of that spent on buying discs. The bottom line is that Hollywood doesn’t care if you prefer Blu-ray or anything else, just so long as you spend more money (which means it prefers you buy a movie for $20 vs. rent one for $1) watching movies at home.

I’m going to assume that if you have a file with an mkv extension, you know what for. The container is the Swiss Army Knife of containers, but most of the ones I run across have very high quality video and DTS audio. According to Apple, the new Apple TV will only play 1080p encoded with H.264 High Profile 4.0, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I was able to easily play a few High Profile 5.1 sample clips without converting them. You do have to change the container from mkv to m4v, but thanks to MKVTools (nagware until you pay $5), it takes about as long as a file copy. The other great thing about MKVTools is that it will convert the 5.1 DTS audio track to AC3 at the same time — required since the ATV doesn’t support DTS.

It really couldn’t be easier. Download MKVTools (I used 2.4.7), open your mkv file, select the streams you want (typically one video and one audio) go to the MP4 tab, choose AC3 and set the device to Apple TV and then hit convert. I’ve only tried samples so far, but they all came out perfect. Drag and drop them to iTunes and then go to Computers on the Apple TV and then to your movies.

The DirecTV HR34 is the core of a Multi-Room DVR, but with the C30 RVU clients being MIA and the first gen Samsung RVU HDTVs being so limited, it is hardly ready for prime time — I tried it at CES and the TV’s RVU client made the first build of the TiVo Premiere software feel fast. This is all assuming you can get DirecTV to even enable the feature for you, which seems unlikely given the feedback at DBSTalk.com. Many cable companies, including Verizon, have Multi-Room viewing that they call a Multi-Room DVR, but charging people for a DVR in every room and making them walk between rooms to resolve conflicts can hardly be called a true Multi-Room DVR, in good faith.

I think this is a big deal, because I believe that everyone expects the exact same TV experience in every room of the house, and in the next few years all the providers will provide what Microsoft’s Media Center has been doing for over five years, but in a mainstream way. I can’t wait to try them all out for myself.

You might be thinking, but Ben HDX requires a lot of throughput and don’t blame Vudu because your internet sucks. But you’d be wrong. Unlike some I have FiOS Internet, which is crazy fast, but every service has a bad day, right? So I fire up Speedtest.net to see what it might be and what do I find? 25Mbps download. You’d think that would be enough.

And this test was ran on my laptop connected via WiFi and my Blu-ray player is connected via a wired Gig connection, which I typically get Gig speeds on. So if someone with all the  pieces you’d think would be needed to enjoy high quality HD video via the Internet can’t, then who can? I suspect no one. I guess I’ll just have to watch a different Blu-ray Disc or something on my Media Center, but it won’t be because I didn’t try. We’ll see if Apple’s cloud is more reliable than Vudu’s next week.

Enough about why the new iPad won’t be called the iPad 3, why am I so sure why the new name will be the iPad HD? One reason “1080p.” Some might argue that the first two iPads had HD displays, and while this is actually debatable (the lack of solid definition for HD has already bothered me) when it comes to modern TV shows and movies, HD means at least 720 lines and 16×9 (at least). This means that the highest resolution you could watch 16×9 content on the older iPads is 1024×578 — not HD by almost any definition. A 2,048×1,536 display on the other hand? It can easily display 16×9 content in 1080p (with pixels to spare all around, wonder if there will be a dot by dot mode). Of course these means that along side the new iPad HD will be the new Apple TV HD and 1080p content in the iTunes Store, which as far as I’m concerned is about time (lets hope for Dolby Digital Plus too). Or in other words, an all around great day for an HD fan.

Of course this Retina Display iPad HD will also be good for many other things. Reading a book without being able to see the pixels, as well as any other reading, and video games should be a great improvement — when the developers get around to updating their apps. And as pointed out by TUAW, 264ppi is enough to be considered a Retina Display by Apple definition since the average viewing distance of an iPad is further than that of the 330 ppi iPhone.

Oh, and I’ve been saying this long before the leaked accessory names.

What’s motivating me to change:

• A supported two-way IP control interface with documented API
• A great iPad app for DVR management and content discovery
• Remote scheduling
• Reliability

• An enjoyable and attractive user experience
• True whole home DVR functionality
• At least 4 tuners
• At least 1TB of disk space
• Access to premium HD content

The internet was ablaze upon the release of the Steve Jobs’ biography about a particularly interesting quote that seemed to reveal that Apple would release a TV. This is just as exciting a proposition as it was over four years ago to smartphone users who dreamed that Apple would fix the mobile phone. But the fact is that Apple, and many others, have been trying to “fix” TV for years, and to date we are still stuck with hundreds of channels that have nothing on, a dozen remotes and a textbook example of how not to make a user interface. It seems, though, that people are ignoring another Jobs quote, from just over a year ago at All Things D, that seems to explain very plainly why Apple has yet to release anything more than a hobby.

When asked about Apple and the TV market, Jobs’ reply showed how well-versed he was in the TV industry, but the choice quote was “it’s not a problem with technology, it’s not a problem with vision, it’s a fundamental go-to-market problem.” Jobs also explains that Apple made an iPhone and the iPad instead of a TV because there wasn’t a choice, “there was no way to get it to market.” So as much as we’d like to shed the chains that are channels and grid guides, as long as the monopolies that own the wires that run into our homes control the bits that travel over them, there just isn’t a way to change TV.

So when Microsoft shares its vision of the future of TV on its official blog and completely neglects to mention the most popular way to enjoy content today, it just really makes me wonder what they are smoking. Sure “All the entertainment you want, with the people you care about, made easy” sounds great, but without the Superbowl and other live events, it won’t ever be “all the entertainment” anyone wants.

I do believe that the Xbox Dashboard is closer to the future of TV than anything Comcast, Verizon or DirecTV is showing, but have to question any solution that doesn’t include broadcast TV. And I’m not saying that Media Center is the solution either, because as much as I love it, I know it isn’t for everyone. And of course it doesn’t deliver all the content I want either, but at least it includes the most important content.