Apple TV

Reviews: Multimedia

Apple TV

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Apple
Apr. 2, 2007

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Initial Experience and Struggling with Streaming

Once the intro movie played, I got to the main menu. From here you're given the choices for Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, Photos, Settings and Sources. I went to settings to see what, if anything, I had to setup before I could start playing music and watching TV and nothing needed changing.

Back on the main menu I finally dug into the Music section. Wait. What? I have no music stored on my Apple TV? Well why can't you stream it from my server? You want me to sync? Ugh, I don't like where this is going.

So I go to connect to my server and start to stream music over the home network (I didn't spend extra money on CAT5e in the walls and Gbe switches in the wiring closet for fun) and it takes a good 15 seconds to connect and display the next menu. I went back to the main menu (to play media currently stored on the Apple TV) and reconnected to the server again and while it was only 7 seconds the second and subsequent times, it's still a rather annoying pause. I got to the music section and was able to listen to my MP3s without any further issues.

Next was trying to watch a video. I purchased a TV show from iTunes (an episode of The Office), and yet again when I tried to play it streaming from my server, it told me that the device (Apple TV) wasn't authorized to play the content. I reauthorized my computer and it didn't seem to help much (it did break the sync that was running however, and I had to quit iTunes and restart the sync).

Finally, the slideshow that plays when you're listening to music can show photos or album covers. Yet again I was defeated because it couldn't stream the album art over from the source PC, and likewise there is no way to get photos to the Apple TV unless you sync them.

And then it hit me. I realized why Apple had put such a big HD in the unit, and not just 4GB of flash for temporary storage. They want you to store your music and movies on the box, not streamed across the network from your PC. From a user's perspective it makes the experience more robust - if you turn the computer off while other people are watching a movie downstairs, you don't interrupt the viewing, and you don't have to have your computer on all the time. That has its benefits - especially since I just got a notice from my power company that power rates are going up 12% this summer (for every hour my computer is on, its consuming 1.5 cents of power, or about $10/mo).

This entire stream vs sync situation frustrated me a bit because I just spent a good deal of money on a media server, and its becoming more and more common to have a home NAS and store everything (pictures, movies, music, documents, backups, etc) on that one device, instead of having it spread out throughout all the computers in the house. And that I can leave that one PC on all the time and shut off all the other computers off, and still have my media accessible for the TV or anything else.

I don't like having to sync up to a separate device because it only has a 40GB hard drive (of which only 32.84GB is usable because of the operating system loaded on to the drive). I'm pretty sure that many folks out there have collections of music and movies that are larger than 33GB. And it's entirely possible for the user to replace this HD with a larger one if they've got the time and the skill, but why make it more difficult to stream movies and music from a central server?

When I finally did start to sync the Apple TV, it took a very long time to copy the 20GB of data from the server to the device. So long that I started it at 7pm and went to bed at 10 before it was done. And I had to restart the sync twice, once due to me deauthorizing and reauthorizing the source PC, and another time for an unknown reason where iTunes just stopped responding.

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Page 4 of 7

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Setup
Page 4: Initial Experience and Struggling with Streaming
Page 5: Testing
Page 6: What's Lacking
Page 7: Conclusion

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on April 1, 2007 - 11:46 pm

Digg please:
http://digg.com/apple/Apple_TV_Full_Review_at_TheT...

2 - Posted by on December 31, 1969 - 6:00 pm

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