First up: Looks. Apple are big on how things look, compare a PC with an iMac and the Mac always looks better. Compare the Macbook (or MB Pro) with a standard laptop, again the Mac looks nicer. So it comes as no surprise that the AppleTV looks great, it's small, it's subtle, and the only indication that stuff is happening is a small white light on the front.
So the small unit is sitting discretely on top of my subwoofer.
Set-up was a breeze (I think I mentioned this in another blog), with connection to my wireless network almost a non-event.
Connection to the TV. there are a number of connections available HDMI, component, optical audio etc. Sadly my old TV (yes Mr Salmond, that TV!) didn't have anything I could plug in. Since the World Cup was coming up I decided to upgrade to something with HDMI which made connections and hi-res (the AppleTV can handle widescreen and 1080i) easy.
What can you do with it? Well the big advance in v1.1 of the software was adding YouTube searching. Which I guess is a nice feature. We've used it a bit, but generally I can't be arsed with that - although I might use it a bit more if keyboard support was incorporated in the OS. Typing out addresses using the onscreen keyboard is too laborious for me.
Adding songs is quite simple. Sort-of. The default option is sync everything, which if you've got a big library and using wireless will take bloody ages. Actually I'm not sure Apple have the options right there, as the default for the iPod and the AppleTV is to sync everything. It would make more sense to prompt people before switching that on. I guess it's to make things simple, the just plug it in mentality. I've recently taken the plunge and have been buying things from the iTunes Store, so I set my default sync directory as the 'Downloads' folder. So anything I buy sits on my harddrive, my iPod and my AppleTV. There's a few tricks to sync-ing when you aren't using the default 'everything' option, create a new Playlist and dump stuff in there, choosing to sync that to the AppleTV.
PodCasts: I've sync'd most of mine to the AppleTV as well, again default option is all.
Movies: yeah this is where the issues (for me) started. By default the AppleTV handles H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store), this isn't the format most videos use. And some of the QT vids I had in my Movies folder of itunes it didn't like either. And that caused sync errors. Now I'm not saying Apple should have included Divx or XVid support, as they aren't Apple formats, nor are they supported by iTunes. But I do find the Movies section of the AppleTv a little limiting as the iTunes store (NZ) doesn't have any TV episodes or Movies available. I can encode my DVDs to H264 format using the nifty utility Handbrake. It's not as fast as divx encoding and still takes time, even on my lovely MBP. But it's certainly an option.
So as it comes out of the box - I like it. It's simple, functional and works very well. If all you want it for is playing music and movies you've bought from iTunes or encoded yourself, yup it's great.
I'm still trying to work out how to stream across to the AppleTV from my library which is the library added to the AppleTV. I might try removing the library and then streaming.
However if you have DivX movies that you want to watch on your TV, then you'll need to do a bit of hacking.
There are two approaches here. You can open up the AppleTV, grab the harddrive, mount it in your computer and do the hacking. Or you can set up a bootable USB drive and get it done that way. I decided the latter was simpler (thanks to the advice of the wonderfully knowledgable Mr P). Details can be found here. I chose the automatic file option btw. But I did need need to edit the file to remove things (see the wiki for that). Patrick did it all by hand, but he's level of geekness beyond me. I'm all for GUI or at least automation. You'll need a 512mb (minimum) stick, USB2. Booting the AppleTV to get it to recognise the stick was tricky, you may need to do the reboot key combo (Menu and - from memory) a few times. Once you've got it booting off the stick the installer goes through it's thing and installs AwkwardTV, perian and other stuff. From there you can install lots of goodies using the menu, and enable SSH (AFP doesn't seem to work).
Once you've installed and enabled SSH you need to generate a key.
That's pretty simple and some instructions can be found here. Note that you've already installed SSH so it's simply a case of SSH into the frontrow@appletv.local
From there, the various websites are kinda useful, but not really for people who aren't unix geeks (like me) so here's what I did.
- Install and enable SSH (using USB stick and enabling in AwkwardTV)
- ensure that you've installed the Sapphire browser add-in on your AppleTV using AwkwardTV Applications (this is the useful bit no-one bothers to write about) Note Added: Or you ATVFiles (thanks again MrP)
- ssh -1 frontrow@appletv.local (or use the IP address for the AppleTV) password is frontrow
- need to remount the drive as read/write so use: sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/disk0s3 /
(password is frontrow) Note Added: this doesn't need to be done for the /frontrow/* directories as they are all RW (thanks mrP)
- create a directory for your movies, lets call it movies! in the appleTV ssh windows: mkdir /Users/frontrow/Movies
Once that's done you can either command line copy across to your appletv (scp -1
Then you can transfer and watch those lovely DivX movies of Dr Diablo wrestling his significant white ass off :)
Overall: I like the product. It's powerful enough to do stuff I want, but also simple enough to just work when I plugged it in. And it's nice to be able to watch movies on my TV without having to write a DVD (my DVD player does DivX which is useful). I'd recommend one with the proviso it's going to depend on what you want to do with it, and how confident you are in hacking it if you want divx. If your country allows purchasing of TV shows/movies via iTunes then it gets a bigger tick.
B x
1 comment:
Aren't you afraid that the magnet in your subwoofer might eventually kill the hard disk in your ATV...?!?
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