AppleTV: First Impressions
Having decided that what we wanted was a reasonably simple networked media player with local storage and minimal noise, we opted for an AppleTV. This despite there being little video content available for it here.
Running unhacked it’s a pretty neat bit of kit. With no iTunes Store account tied to it the complaints online about it putting all the iTunes Store content first don’t really apply. Plugged it in, powered it up, answered the couple of questions about the TV and network, told an iTunes instance to talk to it, boom, everything’s syncing.
The remote is a cheap bit of crap and at some point I’ll probably program our old Harmony unit to replace it, but it suffices for now.
Video-wise, the couple of music videos from iTunes that were already in the collection played very nicely, as do the movie trailers. Youtube is predictably bad-looking but it does Just Work.
The couple of movies I encoded with Handbrake work properly with no hassles. They even stream acceptably over the network, though I don’t expect to watch much that way. The Farscape episodes I encoded with a combination of Avidemux and MP4Box (to remux as Avidemux produces bogus MP4 containers) haven’t fared so well — Quicktime on the deskop is happy to play them but iTunes refuses to sync them to the AppleTV.
Same episodes encoded with FFmpegX on OS X work fine, but there’s a bug in the mencoder binary shipped with current FFmpegX that makes subtitles too small for our liking. I’ll pursue that line by building my own mencoder and see how that goes.
Just need to get a USB memory doover (on order) and hack this thing, then I’ll get Perian installed and most of these things will be moot.
Overall, fairly impressed, though I kinda wish they’d just ship them with Perian and be done with it.
Popularity: 32% [?]
good to hear. I have looking seriously at the AppleTV as our first foray into the set top media box.
are you considering having a full install of OS X on it, or just the cut down version as distributed?
I’m planning to leave the cut down install on there but use a patchstick to add sshd so I can throw on some extra modules, in particular Perian and the one that lets you browse the filesystem.
If you haven’t already done something by the time you wind up in Melbourne you’re more than welcome to drop by to check it out.