Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I’ve confirmed that the approach outlined here works — you can create a US (or presumably any other country) account without needing to provide a credit card number.

It’s then possible to buy/grab content (e.g., some of the free TV show episodes).

If, like us, you already have a non-US account the trick to using content from both is to have two iTunes instances. In our case we’ve got one linked to our Australian account and that is the “master” instance — AppleTV syncs from it. The other is running on our old G5 iMac linked to our shiny new US account, and while you can’t sync you can stream, even protected content.

I’ve checked that it works with a free TV episode and may try buying one of the very few movies that include closed captions. As and when TV shows start being captioned it’ll become more relevant.

Expectation is that rentals won’t work. I think they probably have to be synced to AppleTV not streamed from a shared iTunes library. No great loss.

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A quick update with respect to AppleTV’s disappearing act. It did it again this afternoon. Quitting iTunes, killing iTunesHelper.exe and iPodService.exe, then restarting iTunes made it come back.

For now we’re syncing everything we want to play (we got the 160GB model) so it’s not the end of the world, but hopefully Apple will release a fix in the next iTunes revision.

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Came home last night to find that the AppleTV had disappeared from the iTunes Devices list. Happy-fun web search suggests that this is a “known” problem, possibly with the Take 2 software, possibly with iTunes 7.6.1.

Suggested remedy was to power off the AppleTV and then reconnect, but that didn’t work. Rebooting the Windows PC running iTunes did. I suspect killing off the iTunes-related services probably would’ve done as well and will give that a try if/when it happens again.

Still, it’s not great. Part of the appeal of the AppleTV/iTunes combo is that it’ll happily stream anything it hasn’t synced yet — or for which there isn’t room locally — but if it loses track of iTunes, well, that isn’t going to work so well. Here’s hoping Apple fix it.

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Good: when you change basic metadata like name, genre, video-type, iTunes simply syncs that change to AppleTV without re-transmitting the file.

Bad: when you change the artwork it retransmits the entire file.

This is particularly irksome if you’ve just gone out and found movie posters for your DVD rips to pretty things up and now it’s resyncing everything…

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