AppleTv Review
The AppleTv so far doesn’t suck. It works. User interface is ok for music. The interface to select a movie to watch is pretty lame though.
Despite having organized my home videos on ITunes into albums (one for each year), the entire list of videos is flattened out without regards to genre or album, simply organized alphabetically (case sensitive too).
That’s ok if you have 6-10 movies you bought of ITunes (assuming you can do that, I haven’t tried) but add 100 home movies and it becomes barely usable.
I hope this will be addressed in a firmware update.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:55 am
I’ve been tempted to get an Apple TV, but burning video files to DVDs and watching them on my DivX-compatible DVD player has been sufficient so far. As I’ve been building a collection, however, it’s becoming less and less satisfactory. The main problem isn’t the time in switching out DVDs, though - it’s been trying to find something I burned months ago!
As tempting as the Apple TV box is, I’m always worried about going with an embedded device with fixed features and codec support. So far I’m favouring the slightly-more expensive Mac Mini.
John
October 5th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I didn’t think of using my mini, which I no longer use. I will find a use for it one dayas a server or phone switch (I have a friend who uses one to run asterisk in his home). I wonder if I could have saved a few hundred bucks.
I have a few WMV files (home movies) that for some reason won’t transcode to mp4 with ffmpeg. I am fortunate I dumped windows when I did or my family memories would be locked into Microsof’ts propietary format and unusable in most applications (i.e. ITunes, AppleTv, etc).
I transcode everything I download to mp4, which is very little. Mostly I just rip DVDs I own or movies of Calvin. ITunes store doesn’t seem to offer TV content in Canada, which is too bad because I would buy it. Protection for Canadian content producers and cable companies no doubt at the expense of consumers.
Doug