Apple TV - What it is and what it could be.

Apple TV gives YouTube for Free

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The self-proclaimed "hobby" device in the Apple product line is neither iPod nor Macintosh, yet it is actually a bit of both.

The Apple TV can be a wonderful device that easily extends your music, movies, TV shows and photos from your computer to your LCD or Plasma TV. Having been around for two years, the Apple TV now at version 2.0 is in actuality a very pared down Mac Mini (yes people have hacked it to run OS X Leopard, but it is dog slow) that integrates into the iTunes environment.

More on Apple TV after the jump.


Weighing 2.4 pounds and 1.1 inches high, the Apple TV can fit into anyone’s existing home theatre setup and can hook-up into most flat screen TVs via HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) cable to handle video and audio. As an amateur photographer, one of my favorite applications of the Apple TV is how it takes your shots in iPhoto and pushes them to your TV for spectacular and fluid slideshows.

The Apple TV is more a large capacity video iPod than a desktop computer as it can’t browse the web, do email or messaging. In fact, outside of Apple’s integrated operating system, the Apple TV can’t do much. We did find a lot of ways to keep ourselves entertained with it. In the US and in Canada, the iTunes store offers online rentals and sales of movies and TV shows and a lot of these are available in high definition.



Purchasing these movies is easy provided you have an existing account; in fact we would say that it is too easy to be renting movies left and right. Standard definition versions are rented for between US$ 1.00 to US$ 5.00 depending on how new they are – movies can also be purchased for roughly $10.00. The selection isn't bad but the library is being added on to on a constant basis. It sure beats having to toggle with that awful Rogers On Demand feature or take the TTC to the closest Blockbuster Video just to find out the movie you want has been rented out.

On Demand all the time

Once you have given your credit card information to Apple and have established an account, buying movies and TV shows from the Apple TV through wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi is dead easy. Pick the movie and once your credit card is charged it will begin to download and will be viewable within two minutes.

On a well set-up HDTV, movie sound and playback is just as good as Blu-Ray for the most part although there are artifacts and pixelation that can occur during high energy action scenes and specially scenes with explosions.

TV shows are equally easy to load and you can get the whole season of your favourite show and watch it at your leisure. There is, unfortunately, no way to back up these movies or TV shows to DVDs so they will take up space in your Apple TV’s hard drive. This is unfortunate as it would be a big hassle for users to have to re-download the movies should anything happen to the Apple TV that would require reformatting it. We've had the device for a month and we've gone and had to start everything from scratch twice already.

What the Apple TV isn’t is a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that is a shame considering its small footprint and the capacity of its hard drive. I wish TV Tuner producers like El Gato Users have found creative ways to extend the functionality of this device.

Great workarounds all around
Content for the Apple TV is not limited to what Apple offers. Industrious users have been able to re-encode DVDs to the required MP4 video format that will work on the Apple TV. Another workaround is installing Boxee (www.boxee.tv), which can stream additional web-video services and offer access to free TV. Since Apple TV also gives you access to YouTube and Flickr you have a lot of options on how to entertain yourself.



One workaround that does not exist is a reset button on the Apple TV. Here is where the device’s minimalist design fails. We ran into some problems with the Apple TV and had no option but to simply unplug the power to reset the device. This would be the biggest chink in the armor of an otherwise amazing and promising entertainment device.

We hope to see Apple focus more of its energy in improving the Apple TV and for Canadians, we need more content in the Apple TV Store to keep us interested.