All evidence is pointing to Apple beginning to add Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound to Standard Definition Movie and TV content. Previously DD 5.1 SS was only available on select HD Movie and HD TV Show content. Earlier in the week I discovered that Apple had added DD 5.1 SS to the new release movie Step Brothers, and around the same time a group of ATVJ visitors also noticed DD 5.1 SS showing up on some SD TV content.

To test the TV Show theory out myself I downloaded two different TV Shows which are available in HD and with DD 5.1 SS. And since downloading HD TV content gives you an SD version, I only had to purchase once. My conclusion is that yes indeed Surround Sound does exist on some SD content. As you can see in the few screen shots below, I downloaded an episode of Heroes and an episode of Battlestar Galactica, both in HD and both HD version containing Surround Sound. What I found though is that only the Heroes SD version contained Surround Sound. One angle I didn’t test out is wether or not a stand alone SD download version contained Surround Sound.

There is no official word on this from Apple and Apple’s website still states that 5.1 Surround Sound can only be found on HD content, wether it be Movies or TV. It was only last week that I had noticed that Apple had removed any sign of 5.1 Surround Sound from all movie content, only to have it return a few days later. Hopefully this is just the start of more positive changes to come to Apple’s digital download content.

25 New SD Rental Releases have just been added to iTunes. And in today’s new releases, there are actually a few decent movies that might be worth watching.

iTunes SD Rentals New Releases for 12-04-08.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Eels With Strings: Live At Town Hall
Evelyn
Evita
Friday Night Lights
High Spirits
Hip Hop Immortals
Into the Woods
Margaret Cho: Assassin
Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry
No Such Thing
Penguins Under Siege
Phantoms
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin
The Dust Factory
The Fisher King
The January Man
Time After Time
To the Limit (IMAX)
Transsiberian
Venom
We Are the Future

If you’re curious about any of the New Releases, click on the movie title to view the trailer. Enjoy!

Important Note: To view the latest New Release for the week, please visit the SD Rentals page.

The latest version of the Boxee Alpha was released this morning with the biggest new featuring coming as Netflix support. All though, and most important to Apple TV users, Netflix support is not available to the Apple TV yet. Apparently they just could not get it to run on the Apple TV and the Apple TV’s slow processor seems to be the culprit. The good news is that they are continuing to work on it. Other new features coming to this latest version of the Boxee Alpha are:

• a new Hulu – looks more like hulu.com, enables you to login (so you can get your Hulu Queue), works faster, and playback should be greatly improved on Apple TV

• a new YouTube – new look, as well as higher quality video playback. some of these YouTube clips look pretty good on your 46” LCD

• a new CNN, Flickr, Picasa and Apple Movie Trailers – we’ve re-written all of these plug-ins to work faster and look better

• Boston Globe’s The Big Picture – it’s a great photo-blog, which we really like, and thought could be pretty cool in a 10-foot experience. if you’ll like it we could bring much more of these type of services (let us know!)

• integration with MTV Music – when you click on an album you’ll see a new option to let you watch music videos of the artist. check it out. MTV said they can give us higher quality videos, and we have a few more ideas for providing a great music video experience on Boxee

• theWB – on our quest to bring more TV content to boxee theWB is the latest addition. it means shows like Buffy, Babylon5, Firefly, One Tree Hill and The O.C. are now available on Boxee

For all the details on this latest version of Boxee, and where to grab it, head on over to the Boxee Blog.

Below is the list of new HD Rentals that have been added to Apple TV.

We have 11 new titles today added to the HD rental list, and it seems to be a nice diverse group of titles.

The Dust Factory
Evelyn
Friday Night Lights
High Spirits
Hudson Hawk
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
No Such Thing
Sex, Drugs, Rick & Roll
Signs
To The Limit (IMAX)
Transsiberian

Head on over to the HD Rentals page to see this weeks entire list of new titles.