“…at $99, you don’t have to fully understand what it does. It has the Apple brand, so there must be something cool about it, right? It plays TV shows, movies, and slideshows? Well, that sounds good. Netflix too? Wow, nice. And it’s only $99? What the hell, I’ll give it a try.” – Macworld
So I got my Apple TV a couple of days ago. Is it as great as I thought it would be? Pretty much! I have a slick way to do Netflix streaming on my TV and also to get iTunes movie and television show rentals into the TV. All I had to do was buy an HDMI cable and plug ‘er in.
There was some tedium involved in entering my iTunes and my Netflix account information by clicking on onscreen letters via the remote, but after that: dead simple.
Of course it also plays music out of my computer’s iTunes library.
Overall, I’d have to give the Apple TV a thumb’s up.
A ‘Thumbs Up’ from you on an Apple product? Label me shocked.
I’ll admit it, I’m too lazy to look it up. Can you use it to play back video files as well? Also wondering about DLNA – I have a NAS drive that I use to serve media files & playback of that would be cool. I’ve been considering getting a Blu-Ray player that does Netflix, etc but the price point of this has me thinking about it.
Looks like supported video formats are “H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats.” What you do is stream them from your computer or other devices. The Apple TV unit itself has no storage.
hmm. So it looks like I’d have to transcode and/or import into an iTunes library. Despite being a mac guy, I really don’t use iTunes that much or really care for it. Plus, it’d would mean either leaving another machine up & running all the time or making sure it’s up when I want to watch stuff. Right now, I have a NAS drive that has a built in server & it’s up & running all the time. I use it for backups for our other machines & to store all my media. It has a media server, so from DNLA apps, including iTunes, they can play the media files directly rather than requiring them to be copied to the local machine’s library. It’s nice having everything in one place accessible from any machines in the house. But my DVDs are ripped but are still VOBs.
Not a deal breaker by a long shot, but it would be cooler if it could just play the files from server directly.