was drifting around pcworld and decided what the hell so i bought one.

to say its so small the clarity and speed it 2nd to none, ALL media pcs should be loike this.

Ok doesnt really do much as in network streaming but i quickly sussed that air video does the trick and netflix although content is pretty kak daughter likes it.

Like the airplay from the Ipad 2 like a big remote and in all honesty all you need, thumbs up from me, think im gonna save up for a MACbook pro but gonna wait for the new gens ones later this year

 

They are even better if you jailbreak them with something like

http://firecore.com/

 

Alas the ATV3 cannot be JB'd at present. They have just JB'd the ATV2 running iOS 5.1, so that is a step forward.

I've got ATV flash on my ATV1 (don't really need aTV flash, you can easily JB the ATV1) and it's not bad at all, mainly use it for XBMC.

Why don't I want to use iTunes and Home Sharing?
1. I would need to add all my media to iTunes, granted I would not need to copy it from the location it is in, but it would need to be in a format that ATV could play, i.e.; not AVI or MKV files, so I'd need to transcode the files I have and suffer a loss of quality. There is also the time factor as well. This is why I like XBMC, no need to transcode at all

2. I would have to have iTunes installed and running on a machine to access the media. Now my USB drive with my media is connected to my Mac, so it's not a massive issue, but I do need to get iTunes launched somehow, either by visiting the machine (it's in the basement) or a process elsewhere that would launch it and mount my media drive.
I could do this via my iPhone I suppose, as I do have a web server running on my machine and already have a php / shell script combo that allows a url to be passed to mount a drive, so I could get it to run iTunes, however, it's got to be done from another device, you cannot do that from the ATV itself.
The reason I have the aforementioned script is that it's how I do this remote mount thing from my xbox, I've got a python script in xbmc that issues a curl command.

 

I think that the Apple TV is great. Although like Markus I miainly use mine with XBMC and IceFilms (which you can't do right now on the ATV 3, hopefully soon). It'll be interesting when Raspberry Pi comes out as that can apparently run XBMC and as such will be able to stream all media and it is smaller than the ATV.

As for the Macbook Pro, there is a new one in April apparently that will be thinner and faster than the current one. A sort of Macbook Air, erm, fat. As a piece of beauty I love mine, but if you are used to using Windows it'll frustrate you. I still want to throw mine against the wall occasionally. Whoever said Windows was hard to use and Mac easy was crazy...

Steve

 

Inuse that iTunes match which is great I point iTunes to my mp3s some I own some I errr have on shareware and I now stream them to everything click of a button and it dloads them, the tv3 uses match too so there all on the also great.

I also wanna jb it when I can I big user of boxee xbmc I won a Iomega boxed on eBay last week for 100 brand new, they retail at 227 the model I got, bet guy was sick as hell lol

Anyway apart from the remote being crap, it's slow as in through the menus. Not as fast as boxee on a laptop, but the quality and catalog it does is great, if I had that interface and the slickness of the apple tv I'd be a happy man

 

Still loving mine, AirPlay Mirroring and iTunes Match are my favourites.

 

Ah, about boxee, don't think you can get it any longer, well not as part of aTV flash. Might be able to download an older version from somewhere.
They seemed to remove it a week or so ago. Think it is because they have their own player device.