Not too long ago I got an Apple TV. I thought I had an HDMI cable at home already so I didn't order any with the Apple TV itself. When it came we realized that we didn't have one, so we went to the Apple Retail store at the Oakridge Mall (not far from where we live) to get one. It is a mini Apple Store so they didn't have the HDMI to HDMI cable displayed anywhere, so I asked if they had it and the Apple Store employee said yes and then got it from the back. When he returned we did the transaction on a handheld device and instead of printing out the receipt they emailed it to me. Sure enough it was waiting in my inbox when we got home. After we got home Timber did the setup and then we started playing around with the Apple TV. My first impression was that the setup was easy, all we had to do was get it on our wireless network and then it started syncing with iTunes on my MacBook. We played around with streaming video from the MacBook to the Apple TV and were happy with the results. There were no slowdowns and the video quality was pretty good on our TV (50 inch 720p HDTV). We also played around with displaying the photos that Timber took this weekend and checked out the music. Overall it is a nice device and anything I have in iTunes can now be shown on our TV. Here's a list of things I like and things I don't like.
Things I like:
Setup -> very easy to setup and start playing around with
Streaming -> I have a 56 Mbps wireless network and streaming a movie from my MacBook to the Apple TV worked flawlessly.
Video Quality -> I tried movies (more on this later), Google Videos (tech talks), TV Shows, and Video Podcasts and they all looked at least as good as non-high def TV which really surprised me. I thought the Google Videos would look like crap but they came out sharp. They were not wide screen but they were easily good enough.
Aperture Availability -> When I read the specs on the Apple TV it said that you could show your photos from iPhoto but it didn't say anything about Aperture. But it can easily show your Aperture photos which I definitely like.
Things I don't like:
Synching -> The synching was ok except for the fact that it seems to go to sleep or timeout after a while. I tried twice to have it sync everything overnight and when I checked on it in the morning it has only synce up to the first 100 songs. I may have to change some settings but I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything right.
No Caching -> I had downloaded a movie trailer from iTunes directly to the Apple TV and then accidentally hit the Menu button to go back before I could play the trailer. Then I tried to go back and watch it quickly but I had to download the entire trailer again. It should Cache that stuff.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the Apple TV thus far. In the future I would like to see it do a better job of synching, pre-load some of the top trailers and songs from iTunes, allow the user to delete Podcasts and other data directly from Apple TV, and possibly have a web browser or RSS reader. I think progress will be made over time to make this an even better device. On a side note my strategy for movies is to instead of buy them from iTunes rent them from NetFlix, rip them via HandBrake, import them into iTunes, watch them on the Apple TV, and then delete them when I'm done. Overall that system works fairly well thus far. The manual effort is pretty low, the video quality is very good, and I don't have to buy any movies.
Posted by troutm8 at May 22, 2007 05:11 PM