There has been quite a bit of rumbling about the Apple TV, lately. It’s supposed to be a laggard for Apple. Maybe so, but I’m crossing my fingers Apple doesn’t drop it as a product.
If Apple TV was positioned as a Tivo or digital video recorder (DVR) killer, that was a mistake. It never had the electronics capabilities to compete. What Apple TV is is a multimedia extension to the Macintosh for songs, videos, photos. Likewise, Airport Express can be thought of as an extension to iTunes for songs to my stereo. As an extension of my Macintosh for songs, videos, photos, I judge the Apple TV to be a big success. The price is right, it’s easy to use. It has very little to do with broadcast TV, as the “TV” moniker might imply. In fact, it only connects to high-end digital TVs for display purposes. But for displaying the songs, videos, and photos I have on my Macintosh, it works very well. I’m not aware of another product that works as seamlessly, short of connecting a Mac Mini to the TV.
Thanks Handbrake.
3 Comments
Absolutely. I was a big fan of the AppleTV as soon as it was announced. It was what I wanted (and eventually got: it took a lot of patience) instead of the fifth generation iPods: something that puts video on the TV as a priority. It has changed the way my wife, daughter, and I experience television. No, it’s not much different from the sort of change that TiVo users have experienced for the past 8 or so years, except that it’s computer-centric (or -mediated) and it plugs into the iPod ecosystem.
Thanks Turbo.264.
I don’t have any problem with Apple TV doing what I need. I bought my Apple TV so that I could share home movies of the kids and photo slideshows with the grandparents on the big screen HDTV. It works wonderfully for that. All my iPhoto and iTunes content are automatically at hand and ready.
I even just imported our 16 year old wedding video VHS tape to my mac and put it in iTunes for the kids to watch. We all got a great kick out of it and the quality was much better than I thought for VHS upconverted twice to 720p.
I already have a TiVo HD and an upconverting DVD player. I don’t need Apple TV to be those devices.
My thoughts on Apple TV are that it may not be perfect – but it’s closer than anything else i’ve found out there.
Yes – it could work with codecs other than H.264
Yes – it could support mounting up storage over NFS/CIFS/iSCSI (iSCSI initiator support on the Apple TV, there’s an interesting thought).
Yes – it could support multicast streams.
It doesn’t do any of these, but they’re totally possible with a bit of hackery. However, it does what it is meant to do very, very well indeed – it’s an extention of iTunes on the desktop.
The interface is slick, beautiful and despite a couple of little niggles is very well thought out.