After iTunes started renting out movies this is no doubt the best product of 2008.It has changed completely my HD experience. Now I rent movies a couple of times a week. Every family member enjoys watching the movies. GREAT PRODUCT!!!
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Apple TV, the way to go, even if you don't have a Mac. I do have a Mac, but I just bought a Dell XPS at Office Supply running Microsoft Vista. It's a sleek black computer and very fast. Using iTunes on my PC just works fine. I can wirelessly play my tunes through my big screen TV and I also have the sound on the TV hooked into a three decade old Yamaha Amp which powers JBL Studio Monitors, so I get great sound when I'm listening to my music now.
Plus, I've recently discovered hulu dot com, which is a new website that stream tons of movies and old videos on demand and they look just great on my TV thanks to ATV. I'm glad I bought it. I'm enjoying the heck out of it.
Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne
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Apple TV (Take 2 software) and iTunes Rentals are just fantastic. I live in China most of the year and can suddenly enjoy legal content more conveniently and just slightly more expensive than pirated DVDs. This is a big deal. Plus I love how it auto downloads the newest episodes of The Daily Show for just 9.99$ every 16 episodes. Now, if Apple wasn't restricting geographic access by requiring US credit cards, this would put a huge dent into piracy. But what's wrong with you MPAA? You want to sue your customers instead of finding a good solution to getting them what they want? Ridiculously stupid. Anyway, the Apple TV is fast, convenient, let's me have all my photos, music, videos, TV episodes, movies all in one simple place with great seamless integration with my computer. If you like watching TV and movies only on your own time this is your solution.
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So far a great experience with my new Apple TV. Setup was a flash. I was able to connect it, connect to the internet, and connect to my Itunes in less than 10 minutes. I decided to sync all my music/movies/etc so that took all night but you really should only have to do that once. Image quality on HD rentals is amazing and watching shows on a big screen as opposed to my little IPOD is great.
The only thing I would mention is that at no point did I realize no HDMI cable would be included. Fortunately I had bought an extra one but make sure you but an HDMI cable with the Apple TV.
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The ATV is a huge IPod interfaced with your TV and audio system. The ATV has a lot of untapped potential in the area of internet connectivity. Hopefully Apple can make this available to the user in future upgrades or updates. The ATV provides a great platform for taking your movies, photos and music otherwise appreciated by a single user on a computer to the entertainment environment of your home. Great entertainment is had as memories flash back watching the photo album screen saver. Also, for those large collectors of CD music the ATV un-taps the depth and breadth of your collection in a single location. Saving you the hassle of physically searching your CD racks for a particular piece of music. Don't worry about space on the ATV, you will be challenged to fill the 160Gb with music alone. Movie buffs will quickly fill the 160Gb and will be faced with choosing what to keep on the ATV.
If you are new to the digital media world or haven't taken great care in the past to build you media library carefully, you will experience several long hours building or fixing your media library for the ATV. If un-hacked, the ATV conditionally requires the use of iTunes. For those Apple natives this is not a great deal when embracing the ATV. However, PC natives like myself will curse that they didn't record all their music in the universal MP3 format and will be required to convert all WMA files to the apple format (not MP3). Furthermore to make your library make any sense on the ATV, you will need to spend time fixing the structure of your library, like correcting genres, album names, artists names and the painful album artwork which doesn't exist for many of the non mainstream media (particularly classical) etc. From my experience it is best practice for the purposes of quality and consistency to rerip all of your CDs to the universal MP3 format using iTunes and let iTunes manage your media library applying the correct titles and album artwork automatically. Once up and running the ATV will show you the real potential of the digital media world in your home. Keep up the good work Apple!
If you need any detailed info on the ATV, visit: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org you will find many interesting articles although aimed at Apple natives not PC.
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