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Digital Skunk

macrumors G3
Dec 23, 2006
8,096
916
In my imagination
Good! I hope it is.

I don't want to have high hopes about leopard's eye candy but I know its capabilities.

...and I hope apple tv is not a flop!

I hope it isn't a flop either. I also hope that FR takes after the Apple TVs interface. FRs current UI is fine and it works fine as a starter option for playing my media content, but it needs to be a lot more powerful if Apple wants people to actually use it on the regular. It needs to play more media formats and it needs to be much easier to go through FR then the Finder. If I want to listen to music. I open iTunes, go to my "whatever" playlist and then hit the space bar. In FR I have to hit the menu button, click over to music and hit the play button, then click and hit more buttons just to get to my playlist. If I need to get back to the finder I have to hit the menu button like six times or reach over and hit the ESC button.

Give us a slightly more powerful remote and a UI like the one on the Apple TV and I will love FR even more than I love it now.
 

MrCrowbar

macrumors 68020
Jan 12, 2006
2,232
519
Why?

Because I want to connect this...

To this...

Without this...
[/QUOTE=Avatar74;3370517]

Lol, I love it. what are those grey titles on the wall on the left? Deflectors?
You should send a mail to apple with those pictures, it would make a great print ad :)
 

nospleen

macrumors 68030
Dec 8, 2002
2,719
1,559
Texas
I am excited about the Apple TV. I do not like plugging/unplugging my Powerbook all the time when I need/want to hook it up to my TV. It is a convenient way for me to watch The Office. My Tivo is full on Thursday's, so I always watch office on my Pbook instead of my 40" Sony Bravia.

I am also excited to listen to my iTunes music on my Bose surround sound. I understand that I can plug my Pbook in and watch, 'The Office' and I can also hook it up to my Bose or use the Airport Express to listen to my iTunes. But, this is simple and very convenient. So to me, it is well worth the 299.

Also, there was a rumor I read a while back about a new feature in Leopard. It basically allows you to use the Apple TV and your current mac to use your TV as an extra monitor. (without connecting your mac to the TV) This is simply a rumor I read, but I hope it is legit...

Count me in as an excited vote!
 

whatever

macrumors 6502a
Dec 12, 2001
880
0
South of Boston, MA
Awesome! Finally someone gets it.

My original post was going to be this sarcastic one: I agree, why would anyone want ?TV? I already have a DVD player....And why would anyone want an useless device like an iPod, doesn't Apple know that everyone already has CD players?

Why?

Because I want to connect this...


To this...

Without this...
 
Well. Must be enough hype for all you people who think it's useless to keep reading all these posts and talking about how useless it is. If you think it's useless then move on to a rumor that interests you more and stop complaining. Alot of people still think iPods are useless but they still continue to sell.

No, actually we're the people from the Department of Redundancy Department.
 

Avatar74

macrumors 68000
Feb 5, 2007
1,605
401
Lol, I love it. what are those grey titles on the wall on the left? Deflectors?
You should send a mail to apple with those pictures, it would make a great print ad :)

In the office? No. Overhead cabinets. I had the desk custom made by a company called Haworth (formerly SMED). The structure of the desk is supported by metal conduits that make the frame and legs, inside which cabling runs can be fit -- rather easily, by way of conduit access panels along every section of frame. There's a TON of cabling in that room but you see little to none of it because it's all in the frame conduits.

Now, the third picture isn't me buried under wire. Just some random dude I found on the internet. I thought it conveyed my point rather well.
 

Yvan256

macrumors 603
Jul 5, 2004
5,080
991
Canada
Where have you been? It's common knowledge that if iTunes can play it, so can :apple:TV. Not only was that announced at MacWorld, but their website also clearly states it (http://www.apple.com/appletv/sync.html).


Except that iTunes and Quicktime cannot play DivX/XviD files. Yes you can add a CODEC, but I'm pretty sure iTunes won't be sending uncompressed data to the :apple:TV.

Also, :apple:TV lists MPEG-4 and H.264 as compatibility (.mp4 files) but not DivX (which is an .avi wrapper for MPEG-4/MP3, with most pirate rips using VBR MP3, which isn't even allowed by the .avi specs).
 

Yvan256

macrumors 603
Jul 5, 2004
5,080
991
Canada
That's great if you have an XBox.Something that not everybody owns or wants to own.

Spend $400 on the XBox then use XBMC or if you're like me just spend $299 on the :apple: TV :)

Anyway doesn't that also require a Windows PC with Media Center or something? Not to mention that it probably only supports WMV or something.
 

Avatar74

macrumors 68000
Feb 5, 2007
1,605
401
Ok Avatar, I did laugh my head off with your pictures....however, to those of us with laptops we can easily carry our laptop into the room of our tv and plug one or two wires into my tv and voila....I have itv. Certainly not the additional storage, but I also have a back-up drive for that stuff with wireless access. Your pictures, however, are classic, funny, and certainly apply to your situation. Thanks for responding!:rolleyes:

Take a look at something here...

HT_1003a.jpg


This is the back panel of my receiver (obviously)... Notice something?

Notice how few audio interconnects there are? There are many reasons for this... not the least of which is mitigation of EMI/RFI. Now, you'll have to excuse the use of Monster cable... It was oddly the most available half-ass cable there was. I'm not deluded into believing it's miracle cable. It's overpriced crap, but it's the most decently shielded crap readily available around here. In the future, I'm ordering online from either Van Damme Cable (vdctrading.com) or avcable.com.

Note that I essentially have no more than four audio cable feeds... consisting of a total of five cables (three single fiber optic leads and one pair of RCAs). That's it.

I'm working towards completely minimizing my cabling profile while maximizing the use of my network as a backbone for home entertainment... so naturally :apple:TV is extremely appealing to me. Also, where I've noted "AppleTV" I'm currently implementing AirTunes over AirPort Express but will soon be replacing this feed with AppleTV.

Mind you I'm not a gadget-crazy techno-illiterate. I'm running a highly managed network with a business class DSL router, stateful firewall and both inbound and outbound packet filtering, syslog, MAC address authentication, wireless encryption, encrypted directory structures, etc.

But network administration is one thing... I set everything up robustly so I could focus on being productive. A technological solution ideally should be simpler in design than the complex function/result it's designed to achieve. This is the definition of efficiency and solid industrial design. This is why implementing :apple:TV is a natural evolution of the setup I've already begun to grow.

Currently I stream my music over AirTunes but I'd like to do away with using my laptop to access via Music Sharing the bulk of my library which sits on 500 gigabytes of storage in the office. I'd like to access the library directly, and an onscreen UI is an additional measure of usability and simplicity.

I want immediate access to movies, TV programming and music in one interface. I want to make use of my existing computer network's CPU power and nonlinear data storage. I want to do so without messes of cables all over the place. And I want to do so without having a clunky gathering of PC hardware in my living room with a half-ass cable conversion (last I checked, no Mac computer comes equipped with HDMI or component video or the correct hardware/software to produce a normal NTSC or ATSC color gamut).

I had the good ol' VCR-plugged-into-the-Mac-with-15-inch-monitor solution to watch movies... more than ten years ago in college. I'm not in college any more. I don't find elegance in having a computer sitting in the living room when we have technologies such as 802.11 wireless ethernet.

I can see if perhaps what you have is a Mac Mini... but I have two G4 towers and a G4 laptop. Do I want cables coming out of my laptop, strewn across the living room to the TV? No. Do I want to move my office computers into the living room? No. Do I want long stretches of cable running from my office to the living room? No. None of these are elegant, smart solutions. They're hackjobs for folks who use hacky codecs, who get their music and movies from P2P networks and use inelegant software to view their media on small displays less than optimally suited for ATSC/NTSC programming.

What I want is a device that will elegantly bridge my network with my home entertainment system without an unnecessarily convoluted UI to access content.

That is :apple:TV.
 

Avatar74

macrumors 68000
Feb 5, 2007
1,605
401
Except that iTunes and Quicktime cannot play DivX/XviD files. Yes you can add a CODEC, but I'm pretty sure iTunes won't be sending uncompressed data to the :apple:TV.

Also, :apple:TV lists MPEG-4 and H.264 as compatibility (.mp4 files) but not DivX (which is an .avi wrapper for MPEG-4/MP3, with most pirate rips using VBR MP3, which isn't even allowed by the .avi specs).

Boo hoo. DivX/XviD are older specs that aren't as versatile or efficient compression as H.264... and DivX/XviD are almost exclusively used by people who gain their content from piracy.

Not that I have some moral issue against piracy... I just don't like the fact that it gives MPAA/RIAA armament to lobby Congress to pass bullcrap laws to stifle internet distribution as a whole.

I support legitimate business models of internet distribution such as the iTunes Store because I believe the proliferation of internet distribution for profit will encourage artists to rid themselves of their dependency on the former distro monopoly of the recording industry.

I don't know of a single legitimate source of DivX/XviD content nor do I care to... It's clear that SMPTE, MPEG and other standards organizations have agreement as to the codec of choice and they have spoken quite unanimously in support of H.264.

There has been some question about AC-3 support but I would point out two things:

1. In principle, H.264 can support a number of multichannel configurations and there do exist licensable software solutions from Dolby Laboratories which Apple could integrate to convert multichannel H.264 to AC-3. In the future, other codecs can be supported, or, using H.264 itself the codec is scalar enough to support bitstreams of enough channels that could be converted to Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus.

2. Almost every stereo downmix of AC-3 contains by nature a Dolby Surround analog matrixed surround that can be decoded by a ProLogic II decoder. When AppleTV comes out, the first thing I'd try is switching my receiver to ProLogic II mode to see if the stereo matrixed surround can be decoded. It wouldn't surprise me. I purchased some Isao Tomita stuff off iTunes. He made numerous Dolby Surround recordings, and being an analog format, the stereo matrixed surround was still present in the iTunes AAC files.

#2 is at least a temporary solution until a more robust means of supporting discrete multichannel is implemented into the H.264 bistream in files distributed by iTunes Store. In principle, it should only be a firmware/software update in iTunes and in the AppleTV to support it.
 

swingerofbirch

macrumors 68040
For all those asking exactly what is Apple TV I think I have some examples which might help.

Apple TV is just like AirPort Express, except that you can't use Apple TV to connect to a printer. Also unlike Airport Express, Apple TV can output both audio AND video from iTunes, while Airport Express outputs only audio. Also unlike Apple TV, Airport Express does not have a 40 GB hard disk.

Another way of looking at Apple TV is to compare it to the Nintendo Wii. Both the Wii and Apple TV connect to your television and use a remote control. Unlike Nintendo Wii, Apple TV cannot be used to play games. And unlike Apple TV, Nintendo Wii has a remote which is motion sensitive. Nintendo Wii, unlike Apple TV, does not stream iTunes conntent to your television. And finally Apple TV, unlike Nintendo Wii, does not provide access to the web through your TV.

If there are any household appliances you are familiar with and would like me to compare Apple TV to please let me know.

Apple TV: A product for the rest of us!
 

PetMac

macrumors newbie
Aug 27, 2006
11
0
Myopic View

I think most of you are not looking at the potential of this product. The average poster here is not a mainstream customer.

This product potentially allows Joe Customer to access all of their digital meida though a simple interface accessable though their primary TV and other outlets down the road. It may replace the need for hard media. As a parent I would love to have all of our media in a central hub accessible through multiple outlets ie TV''s, iphones, ipods, Laptops, MacPads or whatever. I've thrown away too many destroyed DVD's already.

I think we have to change the way we think about media. That's what ?TV is all about. Sure it doesn't suppport the resolution we want yet but it will.

Sure you can hook up laptop, I've done it many times, but as the resolution increases so will the file size. Do you really want to keep all that media on your Laptop HD all the time. We will want a central hub, maybe an iHome Station to access the web, store our media, connect to our Pads, Laptops, etc.

I enjoy browsing these threads but what I commonly see is people not thinking outside the box. Its not about what you want tomorrow but what you will be using Five years from now. I remember buying a Blue iBook because it had a new wireless internet feature. That was what Six years ago. No other computer company was pushing, yet alone integrating Wi-Fi back then, just Apple. That is what we are looking at here. A hub computing platform that is accessible through your ?TV, your laptop, and that jaw dropping product that we haven't seen yet. I can't wait!
 

Digital Skunk

macrumors G3
Dec 23, 2006
8,096
916
In my imagination
Take a look at something here...

HT_1003a.jpg


This is the back panel of my receiver (obviously)... Notice something?

Notice how few audio interconnects there are? There are many reasons for this... not the least of which is mitigation of EMI/RFI. Now, you'll have to excuse the use of Monster cable... It was oddly the most available half-ass cable there was. I'm not deluded into believing it's miracle cable. It's overpriced crap, but it's the most decently shielded crap readily available around here. In the future, I'm ordering online from either Van Damme Cable (vdctrading.com) or avcable.com.

Note that I essentially have no more than four audio cable feeds... consisting of a total of five cables (three single fiber optic leads and one pair of RCAs). That's it.

I'm working towards completely minimizing my cabling profile while maximizing the use of my network as a backbone for home entertainment... so naturally :apple:TV is extremely appealing to me. Also, where I've noted "AppleTV" I'm currently implementing AirTunes over AirPort Express but will soon be replacing this feed with AppleTV.

Mind you I'm not a gadget-crazy techno-illiterate. I'm running a highly managed network with a business class DSL router, stateful firewall and both inbound and outbound packet filtering, syslog, MAC address authentication, wireless encryption, encrypted directory structures, etc.

But network administration is one thing... I set everything up robustly so I could focus on being productive. A technological solution ideally should be simpler in design than the complex function/result it's designed to achieve. This is the definition of efficiency and solid industrial design. This is why implementing :apple:TV is a natural evolution of the setup I've already begun to grow.

Currently I stream my music over AirTunes but I'd like to do away with using my laptop to access via Music Sharing the bulk of my library which sits on 500 gigabytes of storage in the office. I'd like to access the library directly, and an onscreen UI is an additional measure of usability and simplicity.

I want immediate access to movies, TV programming and music in one interface. I want to make use of my existing computer network's CPU power and nonlinear data storage. I want to do so without messes of cables all over the place. And I want to do so without having a clunky gathering of PC hardware in my living room with a half-ass cable conversion (last I checked, no Mac computer comes equipped with HDMI or component video or the correct hardware/software to produce a normal NTSC or ATSC color gamut).

I had the good ol' VCR-plugged-into-the-Mac-with-15-inch-monitor solution to watch movies... more than ten years ago in college. I'm not in college any more. I don't find elegance in having a computer sitting in the living room when we have technologies such as 802.11 wireless ethernet.

I can see if perhaps what you have is a Mac Mini... but I have two G4 towers and a G4 laptop. Do I want cables coming out of my laptop, strewn across the living room to the TV? No. Do I want to move my office computers into the living room? No. Do I want long stretches of cable running from my office to the living room? No. None of these are elegant, smart solutions. They're hackjobs for folks who use hacky codecs, who get their music and movies from P2P networks and use inelegant software to view their media on small displays less than optimally suited for ATSC/NTSC programming.

What I want is a device that will elegantly bridge my network with my home entertainment system without an unnecessarily convoluted UI to access content.

That is :apple:TV.

Man... you have no idea what you are talking about. :mad: You wouldn't know an :apple: TV if it was thrown upside your head.







Naw just kidding :D ... If I am ever on "Who wants to be a Millionaire" and they ask me a question about that stuff I am going to call you. Well said and supports us average consumers desires to get an Apple TV. I want to do about half of what you want to do, but I still want to do it with elegance and ease. Thanks for the intelligent info :D
 

jimsowden

macrumors 68000
Sep 6, 2003
1,766
18
NY
What he said.My video library is quit large and ive been converting them for about a month now.

Folks might also want to know that if you have an Elgato product it will work with the :apple: TV and iTunes.

You should use mediafork. They have such a better implimentation of h.264. It seems like handbreak chokes on a 640x480 h.264 (maini profile) at about 1300kbps, and at 800 using low profile in media fork (which will play on the iPod too) it looks great.
 

inkswamp

macrumors 68030
Jan 26, 2003
2,953
1,278
Why no DVD slot?

What I don't get about :apple:TV is why there isn't a DVD slot on the front of the thing. If it could playback DVDs/CDs, I would gladly replace the DVD player I have now. As it is, I can't justify it as it seems like a rich kid toy and entirely unnecessary for my needs.

Apple needs to use this thing to kick ass in the DVD player market the same way they did with the music player market. The last 3 DVD players I've bought (all of varying prices) have sucked. I'm desperately tired of lousy UI of DVD players (such as they are) and the ridiculous complexity of the remotes. Just the "resume where I last left off" feature and the Front Row-like stuff would be reason alone for me to buy it. I hate sitting through the endless intro screens every time I pop in a DVD.

Perhaps a future revision of :apple:TV will include a DVD slot and when that comes, you can count me in. Until then, it's barely useful to me and (I suspect) most people out there.
 

TheNightPhoenix

macrumors 6502
Dec 16, 2005
498
5
I don't know if you've noticed but AirPort Express DOES NOT act as an AirTunes access point AND a router simultaneously, either. It's either-or... You can switch configurations but it can only do one or the other at any given time.


What?!?!?! I use an express as my only router and play music through my stereo at the same time?
 

TheNightPhoenix

macrumors 6502
Dec 16, 2005
498
5
Anyway doesn't that also require a Windows PC with Media Center or something? Not to mention that it probably only supports WMV or something.

You can use a mac with a plug-in and i have to say it works rather well.
But it does only supports WMV.
 

swishfish

macrumors newbie
Feb 20, 2007
3
0
I don't know if you've noticed but AirPort Express DOES NOT act as an AirTunes access point AND a router simultaneously, either. It's either-or... You can switch configurations but it can only do one or the other at any given time.

I'm with you on your front row points, but my Airport Express can definitely stream music and act as a router simultaneously. I do it all the time.
 

mrrory

macrumors regular
Nov 13, 2005
139
0
United Kingdom of America
Where have you been? It's common knowledge that if iTunes can play it, so can :apple:TV. Not only was that announced at MacWorld, but their website also clearly states it (http://www.apple.com/appletv/sync.html).
A little hostile perhaps? From what I could see it states you need a widescreen TV. I'll be glad if it works on my regular TV though, I'm sick of streaming to my PowerBook.
 

Avatar74

macrumors 68000
Feb 5, 2007
1,605
401
A little hostile perhaps? From what I could see it states you need a widescreen TV. I'll be glad if it works on my regular TV though, I'm sick of streaming to my PowerBook.

Hmm... couple of people have stated this now. Maybe I'm thinking of the WDS mode where it becomes an extended wireless access point. I don't use my AirPort Express as a router (and I never would) as I use a full-blown business class router... so, either way, I'm not really concerned.

I guess people want AppleTV to be everything in one box and I have some trouble with that because invariably the one-size-fits-all never does. AirPort Express doesn't take the place of a business class router and stateful firewall for a network of four computers and an HP Laserjet network printer.

EDIT: I never actually said "router"... I looked back and in my original post I said "access point". Different thing. So, in fact, no... AirPort Express doesn't act as an access point. I already had a router when it came out, so I don't need to use it as one... but I can't use it as an access point to extend the range of my wireless LAN *and* use it as an AirTunes station at the same time.
 

Digital Skunk

macrumors G3
Dec 23, 2006
8,096
916
In my imagination
What I don't get about :apple:TV is why there isn't a DVD slot on the front of the thing. If it could playback DVDs/CDs, I would gladly replace the DVD player I have now. As it is, I can't justify it as it seems like a rich kid toy and entirely unnecessary for my needs.

Apple needs to use this thing to kick ass in the DVD player market the same way they did with the music player market. The last 3 DVD players I've bought (all of varying prices) have sucked. I'm desperately tired of lousy UI of DVD players (such as they are) and the ridiculous complexity of the remotes. Just the "resume where I last left off" feature and the Front Row-like stuff would be reason alone for me to buy it. I hate sitting through the endless intro screens every time I pop in a DVD.

Perhaps a future revision of :apple:TV will include a DVD slot and when that comes, you can count me in. Until then, it's barely useful to me and (I suspect) most people out there.

Yeah... I said the same thing with the iPod. I didn't understand why it didn't come with a CD slot. And it looked like some kind of rich boy kid toy to me too. If I could play my hundreds of CDs on the iPod or import CDs directly to the iPod then I would have bought one. :D

Just kidding again as ussual. I do see where you are coming from and it would have been nice to have a DVD player option on the Apple TV and I pretty sure many people would have bought it just for that. But another poster said that he is tired of buying hard media. Once you scratch a disk its over. Once you buy a scratched disk from Red Box your a pissed off customer. What Apple really needs to do is start movie rentals on iTunes. Then you can rent a movie for $1.00 (hopefully cheaper) and have it streamed to your :apple: TV or iPod. And since the media format is changing, DVDs will be obsolete soon; replaced by Blueray and HD-DVD.

I think Apple may have considered those options when leaving out the DVD player. And the price as well.
 
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