Keep ATV3 or not

[zeiter]

hello all,

I bought an atv about a week ago and I was wondering if it's worth it to keep it. It seems that we are never going to see a jailbreak for it but I love airplay. I also have a ps3 that I used to transcode the movies (mkv) to the ps3 but my old computer is kinda slow with 1080p movies. I have a macbook pro early 2008 2.5 c2d with 4gb of ram.

I tried everything, iflicks, subler, mp4tools but when I am converting videos, all my active memory goes to inactive memory and the computer becomes really sluggish and then it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. Is this time normal? How can I speed up the process?

I am planing to buy a new macbook pro when they update it this summer and use this one as home theater computer. Would it be sufficient?

What would you do in my place with all this info?

thank you

 

[utekineir]

Here is a flow chart for you, sorry for the formatting screwup

Do you want to jailbreak?

Yes |||| No

Sell buy atv2 |||| Keep atv3

 

[paulrbeers]

hello all,

I bought an atv about a week ago and I was wondering if it's worth it to keep it. It seems that we are never going to see a jailbreak for it but I love airplay. I also have a ps3 that I used to transcode the movies (mkv) to the ps3 but my old computer is kinda slow with 1080p movies. I have a macbook pro early 2008 2.5 c2d with 4gb of ram.

I tried everything, iflicks, subler, mp4tools but when I am converting videos, all my active memory goes to inactive memory and the computer becomes really sluggish and then it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. Is this time normal? How can I speed up the process?

I am planing to buy a new macbook pro when they update it this summer and use this one as home theater computer. Would it be sufficient?

What would you do in my place with all this info?

thank you

The inactive memory thing is normal when using something like Handbrake. In both my Mac Pro and Mini, all of my memory is gobbled up quickly and moved to inactive memory and my page outs skyrocket. This is normal. You can always run the purge command to get back your inactive memory (but really it shouldn't be hurting your computer speeds once the encoding is done). Secondly, if you are converting 1080P movies with 2008 core2duo, then it doesn't surprise me it takes 2 hours. I'm almost surprised you are getting it done that quickly to be honest. There is nothing magical you can do to speed up the process (short of lowering the quality of the encode). It's a 5 year old processor doing one of the most processor intensive tasks you can possibly throw at it.

As for whether to keep it, that's entirely up to you. For me and my family, our 4 AppleTV's are indispensable. All of our movies have been converted to MP4 so they can be played on our AppleTV's, iPhones, and iPads. All of our music is in iTunes so we can create a playlist and play it back thru the AppleTV's that are connected to our receivers, and it is also one of the simplest devices to use Hulu+ and Netflix.

But to each his own.

 

[utekineir]

I'm almost surprised you are getting it done that quickly to be honest. There is nothing magical you can do to speed up the process (short of lowering the quality of the encode). It's a 5 year old processor doing one of the most processor intensive tasks you can possibly throw at it.

This

The 5 year old 2.8 octo mac pro I recently sold basically only matched the speed of the ivy bridge quad i7 mini (2.3) bought to replace it as the media server/encoder. And those encodes on the atv3 preset still aren't anywhere near as fast as dvd encodes were 5 years ago which a c2d mini I had at the time chugged with.

 

[chickenwingfly]

To be honest it depends on how far are you willing to go with it.

Too add something worthwhile to the discussion:

While paulrbeers is making "Apple's seal of approval" use of things, in my case I hate iTunes and I basically only put watered down encoded music on it to sync with the iPhone (until internet in my country is fast enough so I can stream from home).
So, you can infer I hate encoding (to my eyes it's worthless since it's not 1950 and there are hundreds of apps that can easily eat any format out there); I use apps like AirVideo or AirPlayIt to stream from the computer to the ATV3. This approach doesn't make me happy exactly, because I would love a nice interface ala XBMC or PLEX to browse through the videos/movies. So I'm thinking of installing XBMC on the Mac, then on the iPad (so it can read from the mac library) and then mirror the screen to the ATV3, which most people have said it's pretty laggy and stuff, so I don't know what to expect.

I enjoy airplay from time to time, and the mirroring feature for explaining things on the big screen to relatives is a bliss.

However, my setup (current and dreamy one) without jailbreak is just... cumbersome or overkill (or both!!)... so I feel at times I could get away with a Raspberry Pi and XBMC on it (but I'd lose the Airplay feature).

To be honest I rather keep it than selling it for some cheap bucks.

Anyway, take what you want from my post, hopefully it contains another point of view for your reading pleasure.

 

[hafr]

How would YOU answer your own question? That's the only thing that matters here.

 

[institute]

Airplay mirroring can sometimes be laggy and affect resolution, though this is more common from your home Mac than from an iPad.

But luckily Plex uses straight Airplay when using their iOS client, which almost always works perfectly for me depending of course on the quality of the source file. I assume XBMC is similar.

 

[iMas70]

I've just started researching the same thing. I like my ATV3 but would it seems like a jailbroken ATV2 would open up a whole bunch of new options so I'm weighing if its worth going with one of them.

I mostly use the ATV3 for Netflix. Only thing that I don't like about that is the movies tend to be older or "B movies".

 

[E.Lizardo]

hello all,

I bought an atv about a week ago and I was wondering if it's worth it to keep it. It seems that we are never going to see a jailbreak for it but I love airplay. I also have a ps3 that I used to transcode the movies (mkv) to the ps3 but my old computer is kinda slow with 1080p movies. I have a macbook pro early 2008 2.5 c2d with 4gb of ram.

I tried everything, iflicks, subler, mp4tools but when I am converting videos, all my active memory goes to inactive memory and the computer becomes really sluggish and then it takes about 2 hours to convert a movie. Is this time normal? How can I speed up the process?

I am planing to buy a new macbook pro when they update it this summer and use this one as home theater computer. Would it be sufficient?

What would you do in my place with all this info?

thank you

You might look into getting a Roku.I have both,and use the Roku more.You can plug a USB drive in to it,it runs Plex,and does most everything but Airplay,though no youtube channel.The interface is not as elegant as the ATV,though the new update is an improvement.And the $99 model has a Wii style remote and plays Angry Birds and some other games.Go to their site and check out the huge channel listing and see if it would fit your needs.Most of the channels are junk.but it has amazon Prime,Netflix,and plenty of other good ones too.For the price having both is not hard to do.

 

[jlluna]

I have 2 apple tv's,both jailbroken and had an Apple TV 3. I never used my Apple TV 3, so I sold my Apple TV 3. I really like my jailbroken apple tv's I can't wait until the Apple TV 3 jailbreak comes out.

 

[LuxoJunior]

I sold both my AppleTV 3s and got Rokus. Never looked back.