Anyone have AppleTV?? What do you think?

[delavoie]

i was reading up on AppleTV this morning and i really like the idea of it.
What i really like is the interface, where you can see all the movie covers and scroll trough them.
Wondering if anyone has it at home.. and if so what do you think of it?
I noticed they are renting HD movies on it now, regular movies, and music.
The interesting part of it, is that there are hacks out for it, that will allow you to play xvid, divx, dvd's ect.. you can link it up to a media server ect..
I wish the PS3 had the same GUI, with the album art.. kinda like kelidescope.

[mkelley]

I have ATV and right now it's pretty much a niche product. You could hack it, of course (basically it's a mini-mac inside) but out of the box it fills a rather interesting piece of the puzzle -- namely, it's a great place to put your home videos (or stuff you have on your computer) onto your TV but past that little else.

I got it for that because I have a TON of home video (I used to have three TV shows on a week) and for that it's perfect, but it doesn't record television (it's not TiVO), the space needed for HD limits it to a few dozen movies or very large drives (I have it hooked up to 2TB of disk space and I could still only store a few hundred regular DVDs if I were so inclined -- probably only a few dozen BD quality) and you do not even want to get into the Apple rental issue (just get on the Apple forums if you want a taste of THAT hassle).

I like it for what it does, but it really feels like a 1.0 product -- perhaps a few years down the road it will really mature (adding TiVO like recording would be a big plus) but for now I can't recommend to anyone unless you really and truly understand its limitations.

[MattVollet]

I bought Apple TV just a few weeks ago and it is really interesting. I am happy with it, but i'm not hugely impressed.
I would recommend it if you have a really large amount of movies on your computer and no way to transfer them over.
I work at blockbuster, so I have over a terabyte of movies and TV shows, and it is really nice to toss a few on itunes and have them over there to watch.

Also, I was (and still am) incredibly impressed with the pq on this... I don't know a whole lot about the technical aspect but I guess since it it runs HDMI, it makes even my decent rips of movies look pretty acceptable.

Like the above poster said, it does take a real certain type of person to do use this product a lot... but you can only make that decision.

Oh! and the remote sssssuuuuuuccccckkkkkkssssss. Badly.
If you use a mac, and you know the front row remote, it is that... just- dreadfully slow to respond.
I even transfered it to my Harmony One and it makes me hate the One everytime I have to use.
A small price to pay, I guess.

[delavoie]

ok so the nice GUI that shows you movie covers and so on.. when you load up all your downloaded shows or movies, are you able to load up matching cover art for it? Does it also show covers for all your music?

[Flea77]

Originally Posted by delavoie

i was reading up on AppleTV this morning and i really like the idea of it.
What i really like is the interface, where you can see all the movie covers and scroll trough them.
Wondering if anyone has it at home.. and if so what do you think of it?
I noticed they are renting HD movies on it now, regular movies, and music.
The interesting part of it, is that there are hacks out for it, that will allow you to play xvid, divx, dvd's ect.. you can link it up to a media server ect..
I wish the PS3 had the same GUI, with the album art.. kinda like kelidescope.

A while back I was looking for something similar to this, and after looking at lots of media servers I chose the Dlink 520 over the others including the Apple TV. First, I liked the idea of not being tied to iTunes, I use Tversity instead. Second, the 520 outputs up to 1080i instead of the Apple's 720p. Third, the 520 is cheaper. No, it will not do the little thing with the covers, but with over 450 movies and somewhere near 400 TV shows on 2.25TB of storage, the covers were the least of my concerns.

Allan

[mkelley]

Originally Posted by delavoie

ok so the nice GUI that shows you movie covers and so on.. when you load up all your downloaded shows or movies, are you able to load up matching cover art for it? Does it also show covers for all your music?

It sounds as if you've never used iTunes -- it's free and I'd recommend you at least download and try it out as it will answer a lot of your questions about Apple TV (as the above poster notes, you need to use iTunes with it -- I don't see that as a drawback but a positive, but then again I have two iPods and the iPhone :>).

In iTunes you put your movies and it will attempt to find screen art for them but you can also customize this (so you can choose anything you want for your art, including frames from the movie). Same for music album covers -- iTunes is actually very sweet when it comes to controlling your music (I have Aiport Express units all over my house, so I use wireless streaming for all my music playing -- control it with the iPhone so I can sit out on the lanai and dial up what I want to hear right from my phone!).

Album Flow view is really slick and has sold a lot of people on the iPod/iPhone (and, I guess, even Apple TV).

[Blue-Man]

So what would you need to get in order to watch movies not from itunes, and is it free?

[cking2729]

Originally Posted by Blue-Man

So what would you need to get in order to watch movies not from itunes, and is it free?

You can't, can you?

[Papi4baby]

i believe there's a way. I know MP3 for the Ipod, you put them on itunes then you can pass then to the Ipod, so im sure you can do the same with ATV.

[mkelley]

Originally Posted by Blue-Man

So what would you need to get in order to watch movies not from itunes, and is it free?

Handbrake is used by most of us -- and it's free for both the Mac and the PC.

You are looking for something to convert your movies into MP4s, and it depends on what format you have your video in to begin with. I use Cucusoft's software to convert my WMV and AVIs into MP4s -- Quicktime Pro will work for AVIs and other formats it reads, but it won't work for WMV.

Once converted it's about 1gb per movie at around DVD quality -- you can convert at a higher rate but I would only recommend that if you were doing HD.

[Galley]

I use mine mostly for listening to my 15,000 music files, and watching HD podcasts, but I will soon be ripping my dozens of TV Show DVDs.