anyone know anything about it?

4/7/2007 9:09:19 PM

its like windows MCE or a dvr in a little box. It has more features than a DVR with the ability to sync to apple or windows computers. Windows MCE has many more features and more customization. Its not a bad product, like most of the things apple makes, but how much you'll get out of it depends on what you want out of it. If you want to download and watch movies from itunes onto your tv. Its great. If you want DVR functionality, Fm radio, internet radio, exct... you want windows MCE. Personally I'm using XP pro plus media portal and it works great.

[Edited on April 7, 2007 at 9:50 PM. Reason : ]

4/7/2007 9:50:02 PM

thanks

4/7/2007 9:56:30 PM

From what I understand about it, it has no DVR functionality. Basically, it can stream whatever you have in your iTunes library but thats about it.

4/7/2007 10:01:03 PM

It can also be hacked to run Mac OS X, and has HD video output.

Unless you really love you some iTunes videos, I wouldn't buy it unless you intend to hack it.

[Edited on April 7, 2007 at 10:12 PM. Reason : ]

4/7/2007 10:06:05 PM

further investigation has revealed TJB627 to be correct... its not a DVR... i'm growing less impressed with this thing...

4/7/2007 10:09:07 PM

gonna have to agree thus far and say that this sucker is definitely only worth it if you hack and probably not even worth that...
i for one won't be attempting to get one

4/8/2007 1:11:35 AM

the xbox 360 can do almost the same stuff and play video games and dvds..

4/8/2007 1:28:21 AM

sans the 3 lights of , correct

4/8/2007 2:34:36 AM

The main limitation of the 360 compared to the APpleTV is that it can't be hacked to play divx and it can't play videos from iTunes, and it's also bulkier and louder.

4/8/2007 3:36:28 AM

Quote :

"The main limitation of the 360 compared to the APpleTV is that it can't be hacked to play divx"

False.

Quote :

"it can't play videos from iTunes"

Probably not true as well, but I don't care enough to even bother looking. Also why would you bother?

Quote :

"and it's also bulkier and louder."

bulkier? ok, but who really cares? louder? Perhaps a little, but have you heard a 360 without a disc inside? It's not nearly as loud as the haters would have you believe.

Oh and there's also the little item about it playing video games too.

4/8/2007 8:44:34 AM

^ LOTS of people care about bulkier devices, and the Xbox is very loud for a home theatre device.

And the things for the Xbox I know of that let it play back divs are really transcoding to WMV on the fly, which means they can't be stored on the Xbox's HD, they have to be streamed from a host PC.

4/8/2007 12:20:09 PM

jeez, so much misinformation already....

just go read some of the dozens of full reviews available.
The short of it is this: Apple TV works great at doing what it's made for. That being said, you must study the feature list to see if that what you want. It does not do everything an XBox/DVR/entertainment pc/etc does, nor is it supposed to. But if you understand what its capabilities and limits are, then the concensus is that it's a fine piece of hardware (overpriced? well, that's another issue).

http://www.apple.com/appletv/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/appletv.ars
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2952&p=1
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/22/apple-tv-rocks/ (long time MS employee)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130095-page,1/article.html
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/05/apple-tv-review/
http://reviews.cnet.com/Apple_TV/4505-6739_7-32306442.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2104966,00.asp

4/8/2007 2:38:15 PM

as mentioned before, the Apple TV is highly hackable, since it's basically running a modified version of OX 10.4.7
here are some utilities and hacks you can add to it to greatly expand the functionality
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/09/free-apple-tv-utilities/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/09/apple-tv-gets-rss-plugin-game-emulation-and-1000-bounty-for-ex/

4/9/2007 4:00:39 PM

360 soon to support x.264, mpeg4, etc.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0408-im.htm

4/9/2007 7:38:33 PM

woohoo!

4/9/2007 8:41:30 PM

why would you buy something that is a dvr box, when realistically, for cable service, you have to get a box from the cable company and you might as well get the DVR with it.

4/10/2007 1:18:59 AM

^ does that have anything to do with anything in this thread?

4/10/2007 7:29:48 AM

Quote :

"360 soon to support x.264, mpeg4, etc."

you mean formats the ps3 has supported since launch?

4/10/2007 9:12:19 AM

^^people bitching about apple tv not having dvr.

4/10/2007 9:14:46 AM

Just read that HD is on the way... washington post is doing HD podcast now so it won't be long till tv shows and such are selling in hd

4/10/2007 7:42:25 PM

This thing is worthless. iTunes videos come in 640x480... who cares if it has HD output, it's going to look like standard TV on an HDTV. And yes I know you can make your own H.264 video (I've done it myself), but it seems like a big waste of time when you can just plug your computer into the TV.

4/11/2007 9:41:59 AM

Quote :

"Just read that HD is on the way... washington post is doing HD podcast now so it won't be long till tv shows and such are selling in hd"

thus hinting at itunes selling HD soon

4/11/2007 2:28:51 PM

AppleTV is basically an iPod for your TV. It syncs with iTunes just as before, but requires a digital television set to work (which seems weird because no HD video content on iTunes yet... but you can still provide your own files just as before). It is supposedly hackable to play additional video codecs, though I'm not sure how you get those files into iTunes.

It's nice for parties to let people browse your music collection on your tv instead of getting into your personal PC files. Of course, you could have just gotten a video cable for a regular iPod... only now it's wireless w/ 802.11n

Although the typical use is to synch it like iPod, you're not likely to store all your videos on there, so those can be streamed instead (from up to 5 registered computers I believe). So this is good if you have a bunch of pirated movies you want to stream to your tv wirelessly.

If you don't have an ATSC tuner on your TV, you might consider getting something like elgato's eyetv (for mac) to use your computer as a dvr and stream the HD video to appleTV

4/15/2007 6:01:29 PM