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Apple TV
Testing
One of the first things I noticed during my first night testing the unit is that the remote that comes with the Apple TV also works with my MacBook that is sitting on my lap while I write this review. This is nice, but also has a big downside. It works with my MacBook, even when I don't want it to. I'll hit the menu button on the remote and both the Apple TV and MacBook respond to the command. Even if I hold the remote in front of my MacBook (the IR receiver faces the user) somehow the signal still bounces around and the MacBook will pick up on it. The only way to stop it is to cover the IR receiver with a pillow or some other object to block the incoming IR signals. While music is playing, you'll initially get the track name, artist, album, and the cover art if you have it. After a while it will enter a screen saver mode that, by default, will display photos with the track info display in the lower left corner of the screen. For me, it displayed the default photo selection since I don't have any photos available on my server. However you can change this, from the Apple TV logo, album art or pictures. So I changed my screen saver to album art so I don't have to stare at the same stock photography that shows up. The video quality was surprisingly good. I watched an episode of The Office and was very happy with the quality. On my 62" HDTV at 9' away from the screen I didn't really notice any problems with the video, other than it not being in HD quality (it was widescreen however, so it did take up the full 16x9 screen). As I mentioned before, Apple currently does not sell any HD content through their online store. With all video formats, you can pause, plus fast forward and rewind at two speeds. If you hit the menu button during playback it will exit playback and bring you to the previous menu. From there, if you reenter the video you can pick up where you left off, which is a really nice feature if you jump around to stuff. If you try to sync over videos that won't work on the Apple TV, iTunes will inform you of this during the sync process, so there isn't any way (without pulling the hard drive out of the box and preloading some movies) to play anything that Apple says isn't supported. Podcasts were the same as music in terms of interface and experience. Video podcasts were more compelling on my TV than on an iPod or on my computer. It's almost like watching a real TV show, albeit with a lower bitrate - though I will say the DL.TV H.264 video podcast did look 95% of the quality of a TV broadcast. I wonder if we could see a resurgence of video podcasts because people can start to watch them like TV shows as opposed to streaming internet video a la Youtube. The Photos menu allowed me to browse through synced photos from my computer, divided into directories that the Apple TV treated as different albums. The photos looked excellent and the presentation was nice, they even have the Ken Burns Effect on by default. Though I was kind of disappointed with the ability to put the music to the photos, as you have to go into iTunes and create the playlist - there is no way to do this on the fly from the Apple TV device itself. The Apple TV will automatically pick songs out from your library to play behind a photo slideshow, which might be OK except that for the first time I started a slide show it picked a Lewis Black standup CD to pull from. Streaming trailers, television episodes, music videos, etc. all downloaded and played without incident over my 6Mb/s connection. And the transfer was rather quick, however the video content was only at SD quality. In fact, all the content available for purchase or viewable through the iTunes store is in SD quality, and no HD (720p) quality content is offered.
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 2 - Posted by
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