AppleTV: What the hell is it?
I confess that I don't understand Apple TV. It's a slim device with a small hard drive showing downloaded media at 720p. It's a network interface that allows you to shove the crap you're buying off iTunes and all that other digital video from your computer to your shiny new wide screen LCD.
But... what the hell is it?
It's not a DVR. It won't record broadcast events, right? It has a hard drive to hold a lot of pictures and whatever (not that I know anyone showing slideshows of their Hawaiian vacation on their TVs, at least not yet and thank God for that) but what they want to have happen is that you're buying movies from iTunes and then wirelessly streaming them across to the living room where this will chug its little heart out trying to broadcast them to your TV.
At the moment, I have a Mac Mini connected to my TV and it chokes on pretty much anything I want to show full screen at anything close to full resolution, which is not unexpected on a 1080p monitor. But it's essentially already doing what Apple TV proposes to do for me. Admittedly, Apple TV does so for $400 less, but if Apple is aiming this at the future digital living room, won't we have our computers with their HDMI or DVI plugs already using the monitor?
I often misunderstand the elegance and simplicity of Apple's ideas. The iPod is only the most obvious example. "An MP3 player? This is revolutionary?" But when I read about and look at the stats for this little silver box... I don't get it.
But... what the hell is it?
It's not a DVR. It won't record broadcast events, right? It has a hard drive to hold a lot of pictures and whatever (not that I know anyone showing slideshows of their Hawaiian vacation on their TVs, at least not yet and thank God for that) but what they want to have happen is that you're buying movies from iTunes and then wirelessly streaming them across to the living room where this will chug its little heart out trying to broadcast them to your TV.
At the moment, I have a Mac Mini connected to my TV and it chokes on pretty much anything I want to show full screen at anything close to full resolution, which is not unexpected on a 1080p monitor. But it's essentially already doing what Apple TV proposes to do for me. Admittedly, Apple TV does so for $400 less, but if Apple is aiming this at the future digital living room, won't we have our computers with their HDMI or DVI plugs already using the monitor?
I often misunderstand the elegance and simplicity of Apple's ideas. The iPod is only the most obvious example. "An MP3 player? This is revolutionary?" But when I read about and look at the stats for this little silver box... I don't get it.
Comments
have them waiting there when it's time to watch some on demand tv.
This thing is designed for me. If I already had a computer hooked up to my TV, it wouldn't be nearly as cool.
Of course, you could rip all of your DVDs, using Handbrake or something, to a massive hard drive and then you'd basically have your whole library of movies, TV shows, and the like available on demand via your Apple TV, no swapping of DVDs needed. Plus you can sync 50 hours of video to it, so you can use it like a moderately portable iPod for movies....take it and 25 of your favorite movies with you on vacation, to the office, to a friend's house, to your vacation home, etc.
If not, I can make an applescript folder action to say "any torrent that lands here gets converted". I'm sure someone else will write a nice app for this. Maybe even built into a bittorrent client.
Apple can never legally offer all these codecs, so we're stuck with this kind of conversion for now. As time goes on, maybe pirates will start offering more Quicktime-accessible vids.