I think the GP specifically meant "no way of legally purchasing some big-name-production-house-licensed title as a DRM-free digital-native asset", the way you currently can with e.g. iTunes' DRM-free AAC audio files.

>Ripping your own dvd

Tell me with a straight face that Apple gives a shit about DVDs.

>recording from tv

Fumbling around with capture cards is roughly the opposite of the Apple TV's ethos.

>public domain or cc licensed footage, public domain or cc licensed footage, buying from independent distributors or the authors themselves, video blogs, buying learning material etc.

Vimeo is already a pretty polished UX for most of the independent film use cases. Offline is a concern on mobile devices but not really relevant to the Apple TV.

Also, let's be realistic here, people aren't watching public domain content on their couches day in and day out, they're watching big-name TV shows.

I think ripping your own DVD is still illegal in the US under DMCA and WIPO Copyright Treaty countries. DMCA says you can't remove copyright-enforcing measures on your owned media. It's crazy dumb.

Someone correct me if this is no longer true, or if I misunderstood it from the DeCSS days.

You can indeed make your own movies, and a way to stream from Final Cut to your Apple TV is sorely lacking - AirPlay is too choppy. However, playing generic video files is just about the worst way to support this capability, because you can expect to wait 2-10 hours for your movie to render to a file, even on top-end hardware. The more "Apple" solution to this problem is streaming to an Apple TV app hooked into the Final Cut preview mechanism.

You can license movies from creators in ways other than the general release, and I have worked with content obtained this way in auditorium film screenings. You definitely wouldn't use an Apple TV for that, though, you use high-end rackmount DVD/Blu-Ray players, HDCP media servers, or specialized cue playback software so that the audience doesn't see you fumbling with controls - they're on a dedicated interface. Granted there are scenarios other than public exhibition, but if it's for consumption in your living room then it's pretty much by definition general release.

Apple is one of the first movers in killing physical media. At this point I don't think you can even buy a Mac with a built-in DVD drive; facilitating playback of ripped DVDs would be pretty low on the priority list.

Closest thing I can anticipate would be a way to play videos from your Photos library - intended for the ones you shot on your iPhone. It would probably be possible to import an unencumbered video file there, and stream it across your house with Home Sharing, which has been built into the iLife suite for a few years.

Apple does allow this, they just have to be in the correct format and loaded into iTunes on you computer. If your computers iTunes and the AppleTV are on the same network you can watch whatever video you have loaded. I do this all the time. It's probably not as easy as the Roku (I assume the Roku allows the playback of a larger variety of codecs) but for me it works perfect as I encode everything in h264 anyway to use for pitches, mood boards, etc as an editor working in advertising (where the majority of creative uses macs).

That event is only available via HLS, which never took off in the way that Apple perhaps hoped (it's only supported by Apple stuff, Chrome on Android but not desktop for some reason, Microsoft Edge, and a few random things like VLC). I'm sure they'll shift from it in time, but it's not without its advantages if you don't care about latency; it plays nice with dumb CDNs and caching proxy servers, making it perhaps the cheapest way to stream to a large audience.

There is VLC for iOS.

In my experience, the Apple TV's native subtitle rendering (which seems to be identical to QuickTime Player's rendering) is atrocious. It doesn't understand styled subtitles (e.g. separate colors for separate speakers, or bold/italics/etc.), or Unicode characters in subtitles, or subtitle screen-placement directives, and it frequently manages to do stupid things like displaying comment lines left in the subtitle file as if they were part of the text.

Watching subtitled video is the main reason I have a Mac Mini plugged into my TV.

There are no Greek subs for most of iTunes content. If AppleTV was able to fetch subs from opensubtitles.org I'd had a subscription but it doesn't.

Plus the fact that some content is not readily available in my country, plus the fact that I must change format for huge load of media makes the entire thing a deal breaker.

I won't even start mentioning what XBMC can do that AppleTV can not because it's embarrassing.