Scattered

After just a few days of using the Apple TV I’m thoroughly impressed. The major reason I purchased the Apple TV was because of all the hacking that’s been going on and with Apple practically saying, “it’s your box do what you will” we can expect some more great hacks, if running full OS X wasn’t enough. I had planned at least to install some Xvid/divX playback through a very simple hack but involves cracking the case open. Instead of jumping right into doing that I’ve instead planned to just use it as intended.

I already live out of iTunes so the unsupported codec didn’t pose a big problem. All my TV Shows have already been encoded for iPod playback so 90% of my video was ready for use. The other 10% had been movies I ripped to DivX to playback on your Heleos DVD player. I truly dislike re-encoding video especially when the original format is already compressed (divX) but I tested out a few conversions and they looked great.

It took me a day or two to export 30-40 movies straight from Quicktime through the “Apple TV” export setting on my MacPro and I’m positive that exporting this much video isn’t practical for the majority. Especially since my assumption would be the majority having more video than I and wouldn’t have a fast pc or mac that could export 10 videos at a time.

After getting all my video to a codec that the aTV supported the device shines. The one problem I have now is whether to export my future video for iPod or aTV.  It should be easy since I’m not getting rid of cable anytime soon so I’ll just export any full HD downloads for the aTV (like Lost or Sapranos), otherwise all other TV downloads will go for my iPod which I use daily at work. And all movies will be exported through QT Pro or if it’s a DVD I’ve found ripping it straight to from handbrake is the ideal process.
Quality of converted HD content looks surprisingly good. I downloaded a full HD tv show and converted it’s original format to h.264 through QT pro. After streaming it over wireless, on a g network might I add the video looked great. I didn’t notice any difference in quality from the original format of HD DivX playback on my computer then through the aTV.

Another majorly mentioned drawback to the aTV is streaming HD over wireless. Some say that anything lower then a n network wont work but I’ve got a G network streaming video perfectly fine with about 5 seconds of beginning buffer and solid fast forwarding. It takes forever for iTunes to sync with it in the beginning since it sends 30+GBs of data but ever since I’v had no need to drop a cable.

In conclusion the aTV doesn’t have any drawbacks (for me), other then the minor process of waiting 30-50 minutes for converted HD downloaded video to be supported. And it’s wonderful not having to worry about burning DivX cds or finding a CD/DVD to play some kid video. With it’s simple interface we can pull up a full media library from upstairs on our TV in seconds.

Including in that library is podcasts, photos and images. Watching video podcasts is great. I only wish now that I had a faster internet connection so I can drop cable TV and just download all our HD shows to playback on the aTV. Or what would help, HD content downloads from iTunes.

I’ll still be following the Apple TV hacking scene and I’m sure they’re going to compel me to break the box soon.In the meantime I’ll order a new 2.5′ drive so I can keep the factory drive untouched.