AppleTV: couple of weeks in
Still happy with the decision to buy an AppleTV. Have a fairly straightforward process down for converting random downloaded AVI files (mencoder to the rescue), and Handbrake has been doing a good job with DVD content.
The unit has gotten confused once and refused to play protected content downloaded from the Australian iTunes Store. I suspect this is because of the shonky trick playing shared content from a US account, but it’s only happened once and it’s a bit of a “black box” solution with limited debugging options. A reboot fixed it, anyway.
“Vodcasts” from the ABC are pretty nice. I’ve got iTunes nabbing Good Game and Media Watch. There’s no technical reason they couldn’t be higher-quality video, so it’s a pity the ABC seem intent on building some sort of proprietary BBC-iPlayer-style system instead of simply using what they already have. As an end-user AppleTV is a pretty nice platform for this sort of thing, and the RSS+videofiles approach should work on just about anything. Presumably the issue is, as always, legal rather than technical.
My only real gripe with AppleTV is the size of closed captions. Too small. Probably OK for younger deaf people with excellent vision, but useless for anyone with poor vision. Wouldn’t be surprised if the largest-growing part of the deaf world is older people who are likely to also have their eyes crapping out on them too, so the tiny text seems like an odd choice. But at least it’s there, presumably increasing the size is the sort of tweak Apple can make later.
More captioned content would be nice, as would be video on the local iTunes store. Support for streaming video other than Youtube (e.g., the South Park freebies) seems like it’d be a winner in the US market where these things are available. My understanding is that while AppleTV is not what you’d call an open platform, it is reasonably modular. The potential is huge if Apple were to open things up a bit.
Good use of AU$500? Yes, provided you were already willing to spend that kind of money on something like a DVD player or one of the other networked media players.
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