Comment on Wish list for Apple TV v2.0
Apple TV will never have a DVD drive. You’re missing the point of the device if you think it will ever ship with one. The rationale behind the device is that you store movies on your computer just like you do music with iTunes.
Of course, getting the movies into iTunes is a problem since the program doesn’t support MPEG-2 and DVDs are copy-protected. Currently, the only way to get DVDs into iTunes is to illegally break the copyright protection (CSS) and transcode the video into MPEG-4. Re-encoding the video into MPEG-4 is a processor intensive, time consuming process that also reduces the video quality of the film. So, for the time being I’m sticking with my DVDs.
HD content in 1080p will be available one day but most consumers don’t currently have the bandwidth and disk space to handle it. Thus, I wouldn’t expect HDMI 1.3 and 1080p to be introduced for a while. If it is, it’s a nice plus, but you won’t benefit from it until iTunes starts selling movies in that format.