Apple TV Review:
With Apple TV, you can enjoy movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts in your iTunes library, plus photos and movie trailers, on your widescreen TV - wirelessly, from your Mac or PC. Ready to be entertained? Any time day or night, simply download what you want to watch or listen to from among millions of choices on the iTunes Store. Then let Apple TV do the rest. Apple TV automatically grabs the digital media on your computer and makes it available for you to enjoy on your TV. Best of all, whenever you add something new in iTunes, Apple TV updates automatically. Thanks to the intuitive interface, finding what you want to watch is as easy as navigating a few simple menu items using the included Apple Remote. Just a few clicks and you’ll be enjoying all your favorites from the comfort of your couch.

Apple TV Features
The Apple TV is probably best described to the uninitiated as “a networked video iPod for your living room.” The small set-top attaches to your TV and streams all manner of media–video, music, and photos–over your wireless or wired home network. The specifics:

Movies: Any movie available from the iTunes Store can be viewed on Apple TV. Movies are available only for rent: $2.99 for older titles, $3.99 for new releases, and a buck more each for the HD versions. Some of the high-def versions also offer full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtracks. Apple has secured contracts with all the major movie studios, and the company is pledging to have 1,000 movie rentals available by the end of February 2008.

TV shows: TV shows can be purchased from the iTunes Store for $1.99 an episode, or a whole season for a bulk price. Most current TV shows can be purchased, though NBC/Universal shows are a notable holdout at the time of this writing. Shows are not yet available in HD, but the bitrate on the standard-definition video quality has been revved up, so they now look better on big-screen TVs.

Other iTunes videos: Unlike many digital media adapters, the Apple TV can’t stream many common video file formats–including DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, and MPEG–directly from the hard drive. These files must first be manually converted and imported into the iTunes software. In addition to imported videos, the Apple TV can also stream computer-based videos that have been purchased or rented from the iTunes Store.

YouTube: Over the past several months, YouTube has been converting the bulk of its video content to h.264 versions that are optimized for the iPhone and Apple TV. The videos are directly accessible through the Apple TV’s main menu, under sensible submenus such as “featured,” “most viewed,” “top rated,” and the like. You can also log in to your YouTube accounts and access your favorites.

Music: The Apple TV can be used to buy music directly through the iTunes Store and to stream songs already in the library on your networked computer. Annoyingly, despite being available on the iTunes desktop software, Internet radio stations are not accessible on the Apple TV.

Photos: Apple TV will automatically pull in any photos already in iPhoto (Macs) or PhotoShop Elements (Windows). Alternately, you can have the Apple TV pull photos from any folder (such as the “My Pictures” folder) on a networked computer. New to the 2008 update is the ability to access photos on the Flickr and .Mac online services–just type in the username, and you’ll have access to his or her gallery (assuming it’s been made public). Photos can be viewed as slide shows, complete with transition effects and the iTunes playlist of your choice as background music.

Podcasts: The same library of podcasts available via the iTunes Store is accessible on the Apple TV. As with the video and music stores, either choose from the most popular choices on the main splash screen, or search for your favorites via the onscreen keyboard. Audio and video podcasts are available–some “HD” podcasts are even optimized for the Apple TV.

AirTunes remote speaker: The Apple TV can be used as a remote speaker for any connected iTunes software. Just click the menu in the lower-right corner of the iTunes window and choose “Apple TV.” Doing so will “hijack” the Apple TV into playing whatever audio you’ve got up and running on iTunes, including Internet radio. It’s a useful feature if you want to stream music to your living room stereo without having the TV turned on.

The box
The Apple TV itself is a tiny, silver square with rounded corners measuring 7.7 inches per side and just 1.1 inches high. That’s far smaller than most standard DVD players and stereo equipment; like the similarly sized Mac Mini or Nintendo Wii, the Apple TV will fit just about anywhere. It also sports a minimalist aesthetic that’s classic Apple–the front panel has only a power light and the remote sensor. There are absolutely no buttons, nor is there a front-panel display. As mentioned, it’s available in two capacities: 40GB and, for $100 more, 160GB.

Apple TV User Review:
I had tons of old Super 8 movies, some of them filmed by my dad some 60 years ago. Watching them now required setting up the old family projector, and pulling up the portable white screen. Some movies became dry, and tore in the projector, so watching one of the old movies became a process of stop, remove film, glue it back together, and continue watching.

My brother eventually gave all the movies to a specialized company that converted them all into mpeg format. Once in mpeg, they were transferred to iTunes, and then to the Apple TV via the home network.

What a pleasure it is now to watch my family’s old home made movies on my TV screen. It is now a snap to switch between my movies, and by being so accessible, I can now show them to other family members and friends.

The Apple TV is really like an iPod. It is controlled by a very simple remote control with one menu button, a play/pause button, surrounded in a circle by the forward and rewind buttons, and the volume control (`+ and -` buttons also used for navigation). You are going to wish all remote controls were that simple.

Navigating the Apple TV is like navigating an iPod. You can store video, music, and photos. There is a slideshow feature for your pictures that will display your pictures on your TV with background music of your choice. The background music can be chosen at random from your music library.

Though as simple as an iPod to operate, the Apple TV is itself a stripped-down Mac mini, running a version of Mac OS X. When you plug in the Apple TV to your TV, you will not need to do any configuration. It’s basically plug-and-play. Audio and video cables (not included) connect it to your TV. There is an HDMI output.

The Apple TV comes with a wireless feature allowing you to wirelessly connect to your home network. However, in order to sync your Apple TV with your iTunes, I would recommend you use an Ethernet cable to connect to your home network. The video, music, and photo transfer will be faster through an Ethernet cable. Once you sync your Apple TV for the first time, you may then disconnect the network cable and use the wireless feature in the Apple TV to update its content.

I also recommend you first start syncing at night. In this way, the syncing process will go on while you are sleeping. My Apple TV is 160 Gigabyte strong, and to put that much information on it might take the better part of a day! In most cases, depending on your hardware, connecting through the network Ethernet cable will make the transfer much faster than connecting wirelessly, particularly over 802.ub, 802.ug, and 802.un networks.

You can sync content from only one computer at a time, and you can’t add content manually–for example, by dragging it from iTunes library to the Apple TV icon on iTunes’ Source list, as you might do with an iPod. If you choose to sync with a different computer, all the data on the Apple TV will be replaced.

Another nice feature of the Apple TV is its ability to connect to the iTunes store, through your computer (either a Mac or PC), where you can download music and videos. Like the iPod, the Apple TV will neatly categorize your media for you, and automatically download the covers of the music albums and films.

One negative comment I have about the Apple TV is that you cannot transfer the media files on your Apple TV to your computer. It is only a one way process, with files moving from your iTunes to your Apple TV, and not vice versa. So if you want to send an Apple TV to a friend, loaded with your music and video library, your friend cannot connect it to his computer. If he does so, all the media on the Apple TV will be erased when it tries to sync with your friend’s iTunes, replacing it with the media files on your friend’s computer. This also applies to the iPod. There are software on the internet that claim to address this problem, but I have not tried any of them.

Be careful about earlier versions of Apple TV. Earlier versions don’t support streaming videos. Newer versions shipped give you the option of navigating YouTube, and streaming their videos. I think that older versions can be updated to support streaming videos.

Apple TV also has limited support for video formats. This means that you will have to rely on tools like Techspanion’s Visual-Hub to convert videos to Apple TV-ready formats. You can also use Apple QuickTime. You cannot directly burn a DVD into iTunes. DVDs also need to be converted in order to have them transferred to your Apple TV.

You can stream movies, however, you can’t stream photos. Instead, on the computer synced with the Apple TV, iTunes formats the pictures you select and copies them to the Apple TV’s hard drive. Once they’re on the Apple TV, you can view a selected album or your entire photo library as a slide show. You can choose from a variety of transitions, as well as determine the display time for each picture.

Apple has chosen to say that generally, 5.1 audio is not supported.
The Apple TV does not offer true HD quality.

Apple Computer Inc. has changed its name to Apple Inc. With the name change, Apple is now promising us gadgetry other than computers. The iPhone is one example. There’s more to come.

By Sahra Badou

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