Apple TV Unboxing Photos (and Video)

[Clive At Five]

Think about Sony and Atrac. You guys insult them for not supporting mp3 right away like the ipod did, but are giving apple a pass for doing the same thing with iTV. There is absolutely nothing illicit or illegal about including support for xvid/divx.

Sony not offering MP3 would be like Apple not offering MPEG or h.264. Atrac, by no means, is a standard format. As for XviD/DivX, they're like AIFF or WAV... not the standard for audio files. I'm not going to say they don't have their advantages because they do. I have a slew of XviD content on my computer. I am planning on using eyeTV in the near future. That doesn't change the story. XviD is an anti-priority for Apple. It promotes other sources of media retrieval.

BTW, I never implied that supporting XviD/DivX was illegal or even shady. I just said that it doesn't promote the iTS, which is what Apple obviously wants.

There are other boxes and other methods out there to play these formats as well as those supported by iTunes. If that's your goal, use one of them.

-Clive

 

[silverboy31]

Just got my apple tv hooked it up and set up is a breeze. I love this thing it will change the way i watch tv, movies and listen to music...have everything streaming over g network, works flawlessly, plus i have it hooked up to a sony wega crt non widescreen at 480i ,(componet cables )looks great so i guess you really don't need a widescreen tv.. yet..... since i ordered it last month i have been converting my entire dvd collection using handbrake, its cool to have it all at the touch of a button...
Well done Apple....

 

[Clive At Five]

And this is the problem with lots of Apple folks...everyone thinks that everything Apple does OMG!!!11!!! aw3some. when in reality I'm sure they could put together a software package that would integrate SEAMLESSLY into the Macmini that would do the same job. Or am I just way off base with this? And does ANYONE out there think this is possible?

No, I agree with you. That's what I plan to do (Mac Mini Media Center) because I want a single unit that will play DVDs, be a DVR and play other content from my computer. I also plan to use Darwiin Remote so I can navigate the mac from my couch with my Wii-mote. It will be totally awesome.

I would never buy an tv with its current specs. Too little bang for my buck. I just want others to stop complaining about what it isn't. If you want a unit to do something, buy a unit that does it. It doesn't require an Apple Logo.

-Clive

 

[Mike67]

480i !!!!!!!!

480i !!!! Hello ??!!!

It works fine with standard - def 480i TVs

Isn't this big news?

People have been bitching for months about the lack of support for the huge market of standard-def tv owners,. Now it's been confirmed that it works fine with standard- def TVs,.... and nobody's talking about it.... we just wanna bitch about having to buy a cable?...

wtf ?

 

[Jimmdean]

DVI = HDMI except plug form-factor and the HDCP requirements on HD material. Just get a converter. VGA can be outputted via the adapter that comes with the Mac mini.

I could have been more clear. People have issues with connecting the mac mini to their tvs (primarily those without DVI/HDMI). it usually requires the use of displayconfigX or SwitchresX. It can be a real pain, and the older your hdtv is the more trouble you will have. It's also tough to get it where both text and video look good. It really all depends on which tv you have, and there isn't exactly a database out there with custom settings for each tv - each person has to tweak it manually...

 

[Gee4orce]

480i !!!! Hello ??!!!

It works fine with standard - def 480i TVs

Isn't this big news?

People have been bitching for months about the lack of support for the huge market of standard-def tv owners,. Now it's been confirmed that it works fine with standard- def TVs,.... and nobody's talking about it.... we just wanna bitch about having to buy a cable?...

wtf ?

I'd like confirmation of this too ! In the UK many people have widescreen Standard Def CRT TVs (including me) - widescreen caught on way before HD over here, so this could be big news for Brits.

Whoa - VisualHub has just been updated with AppleTV support. For those of you who don't know, this is a great video conversion app that allows you to queue up all your conversions tasks, and also supports XGrid if you have multiple Macs to share the work.

 

[johnee]

Really, is an "unboxing" this interesting?

it's not like this is the golden briefcase in pulp fiction...

 

[williedigital]

Sony not offering MP3 would be like Apple not offering MPEG or h.264. Atrac, by no means, is a standard format. As for XviD/DivX, they're like AIFF or WAV... not the standard for audio files. I'm not going to say they don't have their advantages because they do. I have a slew of XviD content on my computer. I am planning on using eyeTV in the near future. That doesn't change the story. XviD is an anti-priority for Apple. It promotes other sources of media retrieval.

BTW, I never implied that supporting XviD/DivX was illegal or even shady. I just said that it doesn't promote the iTS, which is what Apple obviously wants.

There are other boxes and other methods out there to play these formats as well as those supported by iTunes. If that's your goal, use one of them.

-Clive

See, that's just it. Xvid and DivX are MPEG (assuming you mean mpeg-4 standard). There is absolutely nothing more or less compliant about these implementations than the one used by apple in quicktime. Lacking any argument about one being more "legitimate" than another, I think the argument can be made that apple should support the most popular/common implementation, which I would argue is Xvid/Divx. I wouldn't have a problem with Itv only accepting mpeg-4 compliant videos, since then they would be appealing to a standard, but by only allowing quicktime's mpeg-4 implementation, it's like only allowing quicktime encoded .mp3 files instead of ones that have been encoded by lame, xing, blade, etc encoders--all of which produce files that meet the specs of the mp3 standard.

As for not implying illicit/shady, you mentioned several times in your post "stolen" content in reference to files that are encoded with xvid/divx.

 

[Clive At Five]

As for not implying illicit/shady, you mentioned several times in your post "stolen" content in reference to files that are encoded with xvid/divx.

List for me a source of XviD or DivX videos which is not recorded and converted by a user or downloaded from P2P sites or Bittorrent. Can you find a legitimate website where you can buy movies in XviD/DivX format?

Look, I'm not trying to call you a theif or anything. I use XviD too. I just don't think it's a priority for Apple to support it. It doesn't benefit them to do so.

-Clive

 

[williedigital]

List for me a source of XviD or DivX videos which is not recorded and converted by a user or downloaded from P2P sites or Bittorrent. Can you find a legitimate website where you can buy movies in XviD/DivX format?

Look, I'm not trying to call you a theif or anything. I use XviD too. I just don't think it's a priority for Apple to support it. It doesn't benefit them to do so.

-Clive

It's not the point that no sites sell movies in that format. No sites sold music in .mp3 when the ipod came out. The point is that it's a standard and I wish apple would stick to standards instead of making up their own (.mov and .m4a)

http://www.divx.com/company/press/press_detail.php?pr_id=168
50 million units of HARDWARE shipped as of early 06 and google backing isn't anything to scoff at.

 

[Clive At Five]

No sites sold music in .mp3 when the ipod came out.

Totally different situation. Online music retail was a fetus when the iPod came out. Apple HAD to make it have broad appeal. No one would've bought it if it only supported .aac.

Online media distribution is much more advanced today than it was when the iPod was new. It's much more established. The iTS has a dedicated following of people who downloaded movies. Remember, the iPod PREceded the ITS. tv follows adoption of movie downloads from the iTS. If there was no iTS, I would say apple was crazy for not supporting XviD/DivX, but that's not the case.

Apple has a strong following of people who download movies from the iTS. Not allowing this or that format is only going to alienate a few people, mostly prosumers like you and me. For Jane and John Smith, TV is going to be exactly what people need to bring the content from their Mac to their TV. You and I are smart enough to devise solutions that more adequately meet our needs.

-Clive

 

[Skrilla™]

its stinking packaging, throw it in the attic or trash it and stop making a big deal out of it

 

[nswint]

I betcha that this AppleTV has no closed caption capabilities. If it does not, WAY TO GO, APPLE. Thank you, Steve, for thinking about us, hearing impaired. When you download TV programs and Movies. AppleTV and iTunes does NOT support closed captions. You can not find anywhere on AppleTV and iTunes specs that it supports closed captions. I understand that the videos must have symbol "cc" next to download page of each program or movie to tell you that it has closed caption capability. I have yet not been able to get"cc" to work in which way possible. If there is anyone out there in AppleLand that can tell me how to get closed caption to work or will there be any support in the near future, please tell me. Thank you. :-(

I never thought about this. That's very sad... I'm surprised the ADA team isn't all over this. More power to cc. It helps my nephews with their reading and me to become more fluent in foreign languages.

 

[nodedawg]

They already cracked one open over at future shock
http://www.techrestore.com/2007/03/apple-tv-dissection.shtml

Looks like a Mac Mini on the inside

 

[psingh01]

hmm, I record a lot of stuff on my ati tv tuner in MPEG2 format. most notably sporting events with my favorite teams. i would surely get an appletv if only i could watch these videos on my tv, otherwise i have no need for it.

 

[Cult Follower]

video was not very good, but at least we have one to watch.

 

[mixel]

Damn (some of) you guys and your selective reading. All I said was TV is an inconvenience to me, and its limitations make the device less useful to me, and no doubt many others. I didn't say it was a bad device. I don't expect people to care what I think or would prefer from a gadget.. Just posted opinions.

I never asked, demanded or expected Apple to support anything, so don't get your knickers in a twist. My DivX "crap" is not pirated. - Lots of peoples isn't.. I could happily have been burning home movies to xvid/divX because it means they play on most devices... Just.. Not the TV ! There are so many scenarios other than the "worthless pirate scum" one, so people have no right to get on their high horses about.. File formats. (ugh)

Questioning things is good. (even Apple's choices!) Not liking something, or finding it imperfect is fine too.

Are we still talking about the DivX/XviD Shiite?

Okay let me ask you eyeTV users and pirates something:

Why would Apple support a codec that would encourage using a system that isn't the iTS for video content?

Exactly.

Now shut up.

Brilliant playground style there, well done.

They evidently wouldn't. For financial reasons. Personally I'd rather have some "geeky" potentially useful features which make it better than competing products than someone telling me "It's so much easier this way!!!" whilst leaving useful - potentially menial to include - stuff out.

I'm excited about the product, despite not really wanting one.. (yet?) I think it's good for Apple, but I also think it could have been a considerably better device, even as a Mk1.

Back on topic though, that sure is one purdy box.

 

[SeaFox]

Why would people care about these codecs if they can just rip their legally purchased material into a supported codec? Oh that's right, because they want to be able to play all of their torrent files.

Because ripping a movie into a quality encoding can take hours. Remember Apple includes a WMA->AAC transcoder in iTunes because they realize that people's time is money, and some would rather look at other devices than have to reencode entire libraries to suit a certain one.

Actually, that's my exact problem. Apple TV wont play back any of my foreign dvd backups since it can't play either standard subtitle format. That's a pretty big feature to lack in my eyes.

It's Apple encouraging continuing education! You're supposed to learn a foreign language. [ducking]

Supporting codecs that have no legal content available for them violates the KISS principle as well has putting them in hot water with the MPAA. AVI is a dead legacy format.

How many people really mean "I can't play my pirate movie bittorrent files" when you complain about a lack of XVid and DivX? Where can I buy legal movies in those formats?

Just because the codec is used for pirating doesn't make it illegal. Just like Bittorrent is not illegal just because its used for pirating. God, you're just like Ballmer claiming "the most common type of music on an iPod is stolen."

Who encodes their home videos with codecs?

I find it funny you don't see the parallel between this and buying movies off the iTMS. Why pay $9.95 for a 640x480 movie, when you can hop over to Wal-Mart and buy the DVD for the same price, getting get better resolution and all the DVD extras, and be back home watching it before your iTMS movie is half finished downloading.

Buying music through iTunes has the perks of instant gratification and the ability to buy single songs if you want. Where's the advantage for movies verses existing retail channels? If Apple was able to secure the rights to foreign movies not available in Region 1 on DVD, then we might have something.

The real question is why are people encoding stuff in crap like divx? Or avi for that matter.

H264 has much higher processing requirements. I'm looking to upgrade my video card right now because I have issues playing back high action scenes in some H264 files I encoded recently. Meanwhile, I can watch an AVI file containing XviD fairly smoothly while I'm running an H264 encode at the same time.

 

[askthedust]

It arrived yesterday

It arrived a day early.

Setting up the apple Tv was very easy. Plug in the power cable. Plug in the video and audio cables and turn the tv to the right channel. I only have an Airport extreme network so that is an 802.11 g connection which is much slower than the new N draft that Apple has adopted. Syncing with iTunes was very easy but painfully slow with my connection. I decided to minimize the amount of content being transferred over to Apple TV so I could start using it quickly. 2 Itunes movie purchases 5 Tv shows and 100 Songs. About 5 GB of space. What on an ipod would be lightening fast was arduously slow. But, one could argue that I wasn't using a wired connection et etc. I read reviews that said you can't manually manage your content. This isn't entirely true. You can, it's just done in a different way from an iPod. My only other fault with the device is that you cannot purchase content from the iTunes store with just Apple TV. After thinking about this for a while I came up with some of my own ideas on that.

1. People are used to using an ipod so it works in exactly the same fashion
2. There is some kind of security risk of it being hacked and your CC info being stolen
3. They would have had to create login in's and PW which makes the device less user friendly.

Once set-up and content transferred over It was a self-explanatory process to navigate through the menus to find what I was looking for. I discovered that my iTunes movies had chapter titles and markers (missing from manually ripped dvd's from my collection.) which I liked. Scrolling through ablum art images was smooth and the better image you had the better it looked on screen. My podcasts (KEXP song of the Day) didn't have art but had plenty of info about it that popped up on the screen.

Also thanks to engadget I discovered www.firefold.com . Best Buy wanted 65 bucks for an HDMI cable. Firefold sold it to me for 5.71 and 3 bucks shipping. Screw You Best Buy! You are supposed to use your purchasing power to drive prices lower!

Could the device have been less expensive and are there other options out there with more features? Yes. Would I have been up in running and waiting for my content to move? I doubt it. Everything is done through the Front Row interface instead of the remote. Overall I would give this an 8 out of 10 rating.

 

[Passante]

24 hours with AppleTV

Set up was simple. I have an airport extreme G network running WPA personal encryption with access control limited to MAC address. No problems what so ever getting appletv to connect with my wireless network.

All my music and movies synced up without issue. I was watching tv shows and listening to music almost immediately. I did not notice any delays because the system was syncing. The syncing interface is very similar to the iPod sync interface.
Edit Picture quality has improved. While I tried a couple of things I believe my comcast analog cable signal was temporarily degraded and it was enough to cause the eyetv programs to look bad. I placed an amplifier to boost the signal and picture quality of my eyetv recordings has improved.
I am disappointed with the quality of Eyetv recorded TV shows encoded to H.264. I'm going to start recording shows at the highest quality setting (90 minutes of content per DVD vs 120 per DVD) and see if that improves the picture quality. I expect that Eyetv will issue a software update to improve compatibility with appletv.

iTunes media (videos and tv shows) look great. Not HD obvious but far better than analog cable and close to what I remember digital cable looked like.

So is appletv better than buying a mini and using it as a media center. Not sure about the answer yet. It is however much cheaper.

Ease of set up 10 (10 best 1 worst)
Ease of use 10
Features 8.5

 

[Jim Campbell]

I am disappointed with the quality of Eyetv recorded TV shows encoded to H.264. I'm going to start recording shows at the highest quality setting (90 minutes of content per DVD vs 120 per DVD) and see if that improves the picture quality.

I found that this made a massive difference to picture quality. It's well worth having an extensive fiddle with the EyeTV preferences, since the picture quality improved no end after a very few minutes adjustment ...

Cheers!

Jim

 

[Passante]

I found that this made a massive difference to picture quality. It's well worth having an extensive fiddle with the EyeTV preferences, since the picture quality improved no end after a very few minutes adjustment ...

Cheers!

Jim

I changed the setting this morning. We'll see shortly. What is interesting is that I have been burning some of these eyetv programs to DVD and watching them and they look fine. Going to do some direct comparisons this weekend.

 

[Jim Campbell]

I changed the setting this morning. We'll see shortly. What is interesting is that I have been burning some of these eyetv programs to DVD and watching them and they look fine. Going to do some direct comparisons this weekend.

This is interesting. That suggests it's the playback settings rather than the quality of the original data that's the problem. Try fiddling with some of those!

Cheers

Jim

 

[slffl]

I just used VisualHubs' AppleTV default settings to convert a 720p Matrix Reloaded x264 .mkv sample from 131MB to 25MB. I would say the original looks maybe 10% better than the converted, but for a ~75% space savings, it looks incredible.

I can't wait for 720p movies to be offered on iTMS. I'm hoping they offer it on more than just movies that have already been released on HDDVD and BR.

 

[Jimmdean]

Does the AppleTV support WPA2-Enterprise (RADIUS etc.) or is it limited to pre-shared passwords?

I'm paranoid. My network is locked down to within an inch of death. If I need to undermine my wireless security to use this, I'm not going to even bother.

Can someone who already has one give me an answer? Most appreciated.

All 802.11n devices are supposed to have WPA2 security. So it does support WPA2, just not WPA itself. Apple's own documents have a Q&A that goes something like "My Apple TV doesn't see my WPA network". The response is "switch your network to either WEP or WPA2".