Somewhat unintendedly, I recently acquired an Apple TV (for this story, see the postscript). As a UI guy and a long-time Apple guy, what do I think?<\/p>\n
First, there is no way I would have considered this before the 2.0 update. Having a device designed to work with a home theater which didn\u2019t natively understand 5.1-channel digital audio is a failure out of the gate. But, with the 2.0 version and the magic that is HandBrake<\/a>, one can digitize DVDs with full 5.1 audio and stream them across the home network quite nicely. (And yay for MetaX<\/a> also for tagging.)<\/p>\n So, my initial impressions. I suspect that some of the things I don\u2019t like are actually fixable, but these are my initial impressions after having the thing for a week:<\/p>\n \u2022 The whole idea of having your whole audio and video library available all the time at the home theater\u2014the main purpose of the thing\u2014is Way Cool. I\u2019m sure there are other gizmos which provide this basic functionality (more or less), so I\u2019m mostly going to comment on things which are either especially good or which particularly need work.<\/p>\n \u2022 Basic setup is incredibly<\/strong> easy, even for an Apple product. Plug in the relevant cables (and supporting full HDMI means a single cable from the Apple TV to the receiver), input a five-digit code into iTunes on the main home machine, and that\u2019s it; it just works. Now, I have CAT5 ethernet wiring in my house so there was no wireless to set up, but still, that\u2019s not bad.<\/p>\n \u2022 More advanced configuration, however, could be better. I really want to change the order in which things are sync\u2019d with the ATV. It\u2019ll let you put photos on first, which is good, but I\u2019d like to give music priority over movies and TV shows. I\u2019d also like for there to be some way to exclude things in my iTunes library from showing up on the ATV; because now I have two versions of most movies in my library (a low-bitrate stereo version for my iPod and a high-bitrate 5.1 version for the ATV), I\u2019d like to not see doubles of everything on the ATV. Similarly, on the ATV, I\u2019d like to be able to have more organizational control, such as sorting my own movies into categories rather than having one enormous list.<\/p>\n \u2022 One thing I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d like nearly as much as I do is using the ATV for photos. We recently took the kids to DisneyWorld and I immediately sync\u2019d the photos to the ATV and we all sat around looking at the new pics. This really is a great way to look at photos.<\/p>\n \u2022 The simplicity of the Apple remote is great and all that, but I find that I\u2019d like more controls. I control my home theater with a Logitech Harmony 550<\/a> (and it knows the ATV remote codes, which is nice) and I\u2019d like to be able to make use of more buttons. In particular, I\u2019d like to be able to navigate the huge lists with numeric keys rather than having to scroll forever. Also, entering text using this remote is an exercise in annoyance. (As my brother pointed out, this is hardly surprising; after all, this is the company of the single-button mouse.)<\/p>\n There\u2019s one kind of goofy unintended consequence of Apple using the same remote for everything, too. I often have my laptop out in the living room, and I\u2019m constantly having to quit FrontRow which has been launched by me navigating the Apple TV. Kind of annoying, actually.<\/p>\n \u2022 We haven\u2019t rented a movie (yet), so I can\u2019t comment on that, though the UI for doing so is certainly clean and easy. They\u2019re a little pricey, but the fact that some titles are in HD is good, and I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll rent that many. In fact, because of this we just dumped our movie channels, and I bet we spend less on rentals than we did on those. It\u2019s nice that the high-res format war is over, but Blu-Ray players are still way more expensive than they should be so I\u2019m not willing to go there just yet. Frankly, I might not be for quite some time if HD rentals are so easy and if the library expands.<\/p>\n \u2022 If you think YouTube videos look bad on your computer, you really don\u2019t want to see how awful they look on a big screen HDTV. Jaggy hell.<\/p>\n Overall, I\u2019d give the Apple TV something in the B\/B+ range. It\u2019s good but there\u2019s definitely room for improvement. <\/p>\n Postscript<\/strong> Somewhat unintendedly, I recently acquired an Apple TV (for this story, see the postscript). As a UI guy and a long-time Apple guy, what do I think? First, there is no way I would have considered this before the 2.0 update. Having a device designed to work with a home theater which didn\u2019t natively understand … Continue reading Apple TV Impressions<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,2,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSo, why an Apple TV now? First, the timing is good, as the 2.0 ATV is now out, the 0.9.2 release of HandBrake understands 5.1 audio in a way that works with ATV, and the new version of Airfoil<\/a> also now supports Apple TV. The main reason, however, is that my A\/V receiver (an old NAD T751) kind of gave up the ghost and I wanted something which offered at least some protection against future changes in digital formats, so I went with the Denon 3808CI<\/a>. (The protection against future format changes is that the 3808 has an ethernet jack and can download new firmware to itself quite easily.) In order for the warranty to be valid, of course, one has to buy from an \u201cauthorized dealer.\u201d This is stupid, as of course the \u201cauthorized dealers\u201d basically don\u2019t offer discounts. However, one of them was running a promo and offering a free 40G Apple TV in lieu of a discount, so I went with that. A nice excuse, really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"