Apple TV
Last month, I received some disposable income for getting older. I had really become interested in doing something to make my digital media more accessible on the traditional medium of our living room television. While I really enjoy working on the computer all day long, sitting at a desk to watch podcasts and movies is really not a great experience.
So I started researching a few of my options. I really like the idea of a Sony PlayStation 3 and started to just save up for one. Then I thought about Apple TV. It’s moderately priced, would likely handle the “iTunes” side of things in a cinch, would certainly have good hardware and likely good software. I’m no Apple fanboy. I like the diversity of operating systems and believe each serves well in unique ways. But I do love iTunes and the way it handles media (generally speaking). And once I looked at what the Take2 upgrade to Apple TV enabled the device to do, I was sold.
Using craigslist, I managed to locate a 160GB model at a decent price ($250, new-in-the-box condition). Once I arrived home, I noticed the factory restore the seller had initiated put the firmware back to the original version, Take 1 so to speak, so I started the upgrade option immediately. Once it was all patched up and rebooted, I toured the menu, set up access to my wireless network and shared iTunes resources from my main PC. Then I perused the features, watched a couple of YouTube videos and linked up my Flickr account.
Take 2: YouTube and Flickr
I am really impressed with both the YouTube and Flickr features. While it is not very efficient to have to “type” in searches using the tiny remote to scroll around a few rows of alphanumeric characters, once you are in, each experience is really great. For what they are, YouTube videos generally look great and even the sound seems improved. But the real winner here is Flickr. Wow! This experience is stunning. The speed at which they are able to grab really great looking images for viewing on the TV is impressive. Though it has a few imperfections, like a bad habit of cropping the top and bottom from photos, overall it really makes the Flickr experience even better. It’s so handy when family is over to start up a slideshow to view Andrew’s latest antics or talk about an event I shot. When Apple TV goes idle, it goes into a screen saver mode with a cascade of my photostream! So even when we aren’t using the Apple TV, it becomes a part of our lives just like the pictures in frames strewn around our rooms. That is such a nice touch and though seemingly insignificant, it really adds value to the experience for us.
iTunes Integration
Smooth as silk. Yes. It was just so easy. All my tunes, videos, and podcasts synced to the Apple TV in just a few minutes. The iTunes Store is there too, albeit in quite a unique form. The UI is really slick and geared toward simple manipulation with the remote. I can rent movies, even in HD, right from the store and begin watching within just a few moments. The picture quality of an HD movie is quite stunning on my Samsung 32” 1080i HDTV. In fact, I’m probably more impressed by how Apple gets the image to look so good and still stream to me so quickly and with zero buffer! It’s hot. A couple of small gripes are the way movies are displayed in the store. Essentially they show the cover art as a thumbnail for each flick. It can be a little hard to read the titles of each movie. Once you hover the cursor over one, a plain text title appears as a caption, but you must hover over it. So I generally find myself hovering over each cover to see what the title is, as opposed to scanning the screen for what I want. Perhaps on a larger screen, this problem is less noticeable.
Podcasts are really well done on the Apple TV. I love browsing the store and grabbing at some of the top podcasts and just sitting back and seeing what happens or throwing on my personal favorites to listen or view. There really is some fantastic content in the podcast space. Apple TV makes accessing that content fairly simple.
Conclusion
Apple TV is okay. Apple TV Take 2 is quite good. I have extended my Apple TV to make it great and I’ll cover some of those modifications in another article. Stay tuned.
If you are in the market for a $300 media center, I’d definitely encourage trying out the Apple TV if you have a store nearby. You probably will not be disappointed. Are there better media players out there? Well, given the recent developments on the PS3 front and given some really interesting things I’ve seen done with a Mac Mini and given the impressive abilities of a Linux box running MythTV, I’d say there probably are better setups. But each has it’s own price, either in cold cash or in an investment of labor. I feel like the Apple TV is a shortcut on both fronts, time and money, but has a significant ROI. I’m happy. When I explain the mods, you’ll learn why I am ecstatic.
[tags]Apple TV, Apple, take 2, media, itunes, PC, Mac, upgrade, center, TV, television, technology, podcast, movie[/tags]
Breaking Update: Looks like Blockbuster might be trying to weave into the Apple TV space. (Article)
J.C. Jennings
2008-04-11 1040hrs
I got a PS3 a couple of months back initially for Blu-Ray playback. I purchased a HD-DVD player the day after thanksgiving and was severely disappointed two months ago when I read that they threw in the towel. Then it didn’t help that my wife was giving me a hard time for going with HD-DVD because in her own words “Blu-Ray is packaged better.” So I didn’t have a hard time convincing her of our need for Blu-Ray after that. I picked up the packaged deal at Costco and was shocked at all the features of the system that I wasn’t expecting. “Search for Media server” was one of them. I can now watch video, photos and music on my TV that I have created/stored over on my PC’s. Sony is doing a great job of releasing updates on a regular basis, including Blu-Ray 2.0 which will secure my purchase of a Blu-Ray player for some time to come. Granted the PS3 is more expensive, but you also get the gaming feature, and man the graphics are off the hook. If you get one game get Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
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David
2008-04-11 1132hrs
J.C. Bummer about your HD-DVD loss. I haven’t made the leap yet to high-definition DVD playback, though my friend Dave Clark had all but talked me into Blu-Ray even before the big throw-down. He has a PS3 and I enjoyed the Blu-Ray experience, plus gaming (CoD4 :), plus media, plus Linux, etc. There are some very compelling arguments that might put the PS3 at the top of the “media center” heap right now. (Welcome XBOX 360 fanboys to the argument.)
For me the choice right now really boiled down to price and simplicity. I wanted something inexpensive and something my wife could manage. I’m sure she could master a PS3, but with the heritage as a gaming console, it is not quite as intuitive for her. Still, one day, I feel confident I’ll set aside enough cash for a PS3 (probably when PS4 is the “in” thing. :) ) The trick for me will be whether or not I really get the value out of the gaming console. I really don’t play a ton of games, not nearly as much as my friends. So I’d have to debate whether a few hours per month of gaming would be worth the purchase. If not, I think I’d go the Mac Mini route. There really are some amazing things being done with those.