What uncompressed video format can Apple TV play?

Question

Hi folks. I'm thinking about buying an Apple TV to stream video files from my Windows iTunes instance. Does the Apple TV support any uncompressed video formats? Like MKV?? Thanks.

Answer 1

Mpeg2 is still a very highly compressed format.
There are a couple of basics relating to compression that you might wish to consider. The aspects of compression discussed hereinafter are not necessarily technically correct but are an analogy to help you understand a little about compression.
Firstly as Jon points out earlier, uncompressed video is essentially for editing and would never be used for delivery, compression of some data will make no difference to quality at all as some of the data that forms an uncompressed file is redundant anyway.
A very simple example of this would be a blue screen. Every pixel on that screen is blue and every frame of that video is the same as the first, an uncompressed video would record data about every pixel for every frame, you can see how much space can be saved if you were able to provide data for just one pixel and tell the device to simply replicate it for every pixel in every frame. (There are about 23,000,000 pixels in each second of 720p video).
You can also compress non redundant data by replacing it with a calculation that simply regenerates the original data (or close to) from information about neighbouring frames, such a calculation typically takes up much less room than the data it replaces.
In considering the later example you will note the insertion of the phrase 'close to', depending on the amount and the type of compression 'close to' could mean so close you could not possibly notice or nothing like it at all. The less you compress the data the more likely 'close to' means so close you could not possibly notice.
In addition to the amount of compression, the type of compression used is extremely important, a simple calculation will not produce the same quality as complex calculations, you might consider here mpeg2 (the type of compression used in your DVD's) as a simple calculation, it therefore can't compress video all that much before it starts to lose quality and therefore the video files need to be fairly large.
Now consider a more modern type of compression such as mpeg4/10 (the type of compression used by the Apple TV) which is much more complex and therefore able to compress video much more than mpeg 2 and retain the same quality, so much so that you likely won't see any difference in quality between your mpeg2 video and the same video compressed to 20% the size.
In summary, you will hopefully see that there is absolutely no point trying to keep your video in it's original format, it will simply take up much more space on your hard drives and you won't get any value from it.