April 21st, 2008
by Michael Swanberg
Apple has updated their AppleTV software and I feel this makes it a far more viable product to have.
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I have been down on the AppleTV because it wasn’t a true DVR. It still isn’t, as it can’t record video, but at the time it was little more than a media extender. I never found much use for media extenders, unless they could be had ultra cheap. But the new software, dubbed Take Two, makes the AppleTV a much better product, full of more useful features.
I have been using my AppleTV for several months now, and I bought it shortly before the new software version rolled out, so I got to see the improvements. Some of these are cosmetic, but most notably, you can now purchase or rent content from the ITMS (iTunes Music Store) directly from the AppleTV. Previously, you had to have a computer running iTunes to do that, and then the content could be sync’ed or streamed to the AppleTV. I wasn’t about to pay several hundred dollars for something that just put my iTunes content on my TV.
Which leads to another improvement. The AppleTV prices were dropped. Currently, the 40GB model is $229 USD and the 160GB model is $329. If you have a Mac or PC and keep your content in iTunes, you can probably get away with the 40GB model, especially if you have a wired ethernet in your home. If you do everything wirelessly, or plan on buying and consuming content on the AppleTV itself, the 160GB model might be better.
Unfortunately, AppleTV still doesn’t record TV or any other form of digital media. But Apple’s take is that you can buy your content directly from the iTunes Store (ITMS) and consume it there. Well, they’re partially correct. Ever since NBC pulled its entire lineup from iTunes, there is far less interesting stuff to consume there. But check online for the shows and movies that ITMS offers and see if it’s worth it for you.
Most notably, movie renting has been added to the ITMS/AppleTV experience. Movies can be rented for anywhere from $2.99 to $4.99, depending on the newness of the movie and whether you get the HD version or not. Once purchased, you have 30 days to watch the movie, but once you start it, you have only 24 hours to finish it. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, overall, but it may upset some people. Typically, the watcher will want to choose and watch the movie all at once. With a decent internet connection, this is entirely possible with the Standard-Def versions of movies, which can be watched while they’re downloading. Typically a few minutes of queueing should allow the movie to play relatively hiccup-free. HD movies should be completely downloaded (which takes many hours) before being played. Unless you have a fiber optic connection, in which case I hate you.
Seriously, though, each of you should realize that the content you will consume is supposed to come from the ITMS, so if there isn’t much there that you wish to see, then the AppleTV probably isn’t for you. But you can put your own movies onto the AppleTV, too. For that, HandBrake plus MetaX works superbly! For PCs, look into HandBrake and DVD43 (or AnyDVD).
There were some cosmetic changes to how the AppleTV works. Essentially, there is a two-stage menu overlaying the screen which allows you to go to Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, etc. YouTube is now also available on AppleTV. And even better, for those of you who may use this, the AppleTV can now be used as an Airport Express. This means that if you want to pipe music from your Mac to multiple locations in the house (great for when you’re doing housework and moving from room to room), you can now pipe the music to your AppleTV and it will play simultaneously in both places.
Podcasts can now be sort-of subscirbed to on the AppleTV. I say sort-of because you can’t really subscribe. You can label podcasts as favorites and then download and play them manually. But they don’t download automatically when there’s new content.
Most all of the functionality of the AppleTV can be gleaned online. I won’t bore you with all that, but I’ll tell you how I use it, which I find to be an excellent solution.
All of my TV comes from 2 places: TiVo Series 2 and an el-cheapo PC running SnapStream’s BeyondTV. Using TiVo’s TiVo-2-Go, I download the new content from the TiVo and re-encode it for iTunes. This will then have to be added into iTunes manually, but I could easily set up an Automator/AppleScript job to do it periodically. Meanwhile, BeyondTV has a podcast feature that allows shows to be automatically converted to MP4 and then the machine acts as a podcast server. So I just subscribed to the server via iTunes and bingo, pretty much any show that’s recorded is availabe in iTunes the next morning.
Meanwhile, all of my podcasts are subscribed to via iTunes. I have everything sync’ed to the AppleTV. The slick thing here is that once something is watched on the AppleTV, it gets labeled as such on the Mac Mini (my iTunes home) so it can be easily ferreted out and deleted later.
As well, I set the sync rules on my iPhone to get as much content as possible without taking up too much of the space on it. Likewise, anything that gets watched on the iPhone will get labeled as such at the next sync.
I do rent movies and purchase some television from the AppleTV, which will sync to the Mac Mini, so I can watch them there or on the iPhone (not rentals, though). Periodically, I go through my BeyondTV and TiVo and delete old shows. But that’s unnecessary as I’ve set the rules to delete them as space is needed.
The beauty of this setup, which I have found lacking in most other similar scenarios from other vendors, is that I can watch anything in a multitude of locations: my living room, my office (which is actually my dining room), or anywhere via my iPhone or iPod. And I don’t spend a lot of time wondering if I’ve watched things already, because everything gets labeled as watched as soon as I sync.
In the end, the new software in the AppleTV makes it a viable product, and not just for people who already own Macs. It can actually stand alone now. Sure, there may be better DVRs out there. Better media extenders. But the AppleTV seems to do pretty much everything well enough to make it one of the best solutions available. Now, if Apple can just get better content available, I might drop my DirecTV subscription and consume my TV and movies 100% online.
