Had a quick look at this yesterday.seems quite nifty but is it worthwhile or a bit of a gimmick?

Amazon are selling them for about £75

 

I have a few friends that have them, one mate in particular is an Apple fanboy who raves on about them but the rest are pretty neutral on this Apple vs. Everything game but all say it's a great piece of kit.

I plan on having one or two in my house, with all my DVDs going onto a home server and linked through iTunes so I can play anything I have at any time without having stacks of DVDs on show.

 

It feels a bit like paying £80 to make the iPad do what my blackberry playbook does for free.

BUT it does look quite handy.

 

It's not just so your iPad can control your TV.

It's a WiFi streaming device that means you can watch or listen to whatever is in your iTunes library on your TV.

 

I've got a 1st gen and 3rd gen ATV (current black one)
1st gen is patched so it'll run XBMC (among other things), which means I don't need to convert all my movies to m4v format, nor do I need to add them to iTunes. It won't handle 1080p though.

The 3rd gen isn't bad, however, there isn't a patch / jailbreak for it (yet) and so I have to use m4v files with it. This would mean I'd need to re-encode or re-rip existing movies, which isn't worth the bother to me. It will do 1080p though, so that's nice.

If you have an iPad and iPhone you can AirPlay to it, which is interesting. If you have a 2011 or later iMac (not sure about the laptops) and mountain lion then you can, I believe, stream your screen from there to the ATV.

The current device is a good little box, but like the iOS devices, it is a bit locked down for some of the reasons mentioned above. IF you purchase all your content via iTunes, then it's fine, if you have avi, mkv files and such like, you'd have to convert them, or somehow live transcode them to get them to play.

 

In the interests of impartiality, I will point out that other brands of streaming-TV-box-type-things are available

Mostly if not entirely Android-powered, as you might guess, and with a range of specs and for a range of budgets, from most of the major online computer equipment suppliers, and also Ebay, Amazon, direct-buy from China, etc.

 

Apple tv isn't a great media player

 

There are much better ways to do things, ATV is complete garbage and i can't stress that enough.

Go on AV forums

 

I've heard about the regular posters on AVForums many times, nothing is ever good enough for them no matter what it does, I've been told this so many times that my tech friends won't even look at the forum anymore, so I'd tend to make my own opinions on something.

For me no matter which way I do it I have a shed load of uploading to do with over 500 DVDs (genuine & purchased!) to put onto a hard drive but what the ATV has it's easy enough to use. I have seen the other non Apple version and they do look very tempting as they're only half the price but they are also filled with crap that I wouldn't want ie. having games on them.

The other thing is compatibility - for ATV all you need is itunes, I can't find any information as to what other software, or hardware, would be needed to connect a non Apple version to my TV and considering I plan on connecting one to each TV in the house, it could be a costly mistake to make.

Just to be clear, I'm not an Apple fan boy at all, but what I do like are things that just work as they should.

 

Such as?

 

Even more opinionated arseholes than this place

 

iPad and iPhone mirroring is excellent.

 

I have an Apple TV (version 2) and quite like it, but only because it is Jailbroken. This way I can play content from a network connected storage device.

Without a jailbreak, you have to have a computer switched on, your movies accessible via iTunes (i.e MKV) and switch on home sharing. Too painful for me.

 

A co worker has an Asus oplay which he rates quite highly. Seems to handle everything he can throw at it. It could be worth a look

 

I think you either meant to say "ie m4v / m4p" or "ie not MKV" as alas atv does not handle MKV only m4v/p

 

Now ive pissed about with all media streamers and heres my conclusion.

The apple tv 3 is very good, IF you have netflix as the quality is fantastic 1080p and also if your media library on itunes is fat, i myself have itunes match, so all my somgs are on it, as well as my kids peppa pig etc, airplay from my pad phone etc works flawlessly, i have to admit apple have a good thing here, you can run some software on your pc which will then stream to your apple tv, as its really a bit limited to what it can see, but for 80 quid id buy one,

So on to the main event, ive used everything from tvercity,twonky plex xbmc and i still think Boxee is the daddy by a long way

You have 2 options a boxee box from play for 125 quid and this will play everything and give cover art to,boot, or iomega tv which ive got its as good as and has inbuilt hdisk, but its antad slow in operation due to the crap atom inside. But it plays flawlessly from anything on my network as local.

Now ive just built another media pc, using the asus totally silent passive mainboard and 8 gig ram, and windows 8 i tried again with plex xbmx, but in the end sacked them all and popped on boxee 1.5 everything worked.

What i will say though plex looks more pleaseing to the. Eye on the ipad but streaming isnt great i still use airplayer for that.

Just some advice anyway, if your a man with xvids mkv and other formats get the boxee.

Ted

 

If all your looking for is something to stream your movie collection from a hard drive then you pretty much have to Jailbreak. I rent the odd movie and play stuff from my iPad/iPhone. Vimeo has great documentaries and Youtube is pretty good. iCloud streaming of purchased media works well. Games can be astonishing.

 

If it plays on "air video" then I can just mirror the iPad can't I?

 

I really don't get the atv type devices. Correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't store/play lossless music files or films in hi def with modern hi def sound codecs.

So they don't stream music of CD quality or films of BD quality, so how is this progress to choose convenience over quality?

I keep hearing people say 'I've got 4000 albums at my fingertips and 500 films'

Really? Are there 4000 albums out there that are actually worth listening to? Not imho. I'd rather have 100 fantastic albums in a top quality media (ie CD, vinyl or lossless file)

It's a shame people don't invest a few more quid in getting better quality sound systems than giving endless amounts of money to itunes for crappy compressed music

imho of course

 

Yes

Dingdonger your right in a way, i myself not being a megga fan, just threw one in my basket at pcworld, and being a netflix subscriber i was pleasently surprised at how smooth the operation was, ipad esk, and my 4 year old found it easy to use.

The music isnt audiophile quaility but 48hz so unless your throwing it into some meridian amp, them my yamaha sounds nearly as good as lossless, but then i didnt buy it for that i just wanted the freedom of being able to pass the box around and the kids have a ready made movie lib and music in their rooms.

If you want the same features but streaming then look at the Roku Xs seems like a good unit

 

What amazes/surprises me is how anyone has time to listen to their thousand hours worth of stored films/music

I mean you'd rarely transcend the threshold your front door

 

Thanks for the comments guys. Some food for thought

 

I feel strangely disconcerted that you, of all people, can only muster 6 words in support Jack

 

I could go on but it's idiot season on here, anything positive I say about Apple the idiots just have to try to prove me wrong, don't want them putting you off a nice piece of kit.

 

I wish my MacBook had mirroring

 

Unlucky!

 

For the people with a version 1 and trouble with 1080p try a crystalHD. It will however replace the wireless card. BUT if like me, you have it networked then that's not an issue.

 

I'm not sure why some of you are even using a £80 streaming device in the same 'techno bracket' as £100's of pounds with of amp quality.

My only grip with my ATV is that the whole ice films has never been the same and I'm back to good old downloading and streaming from the hard drive. Thats not really anything to do with the box at all though. Not a massive issue and I have found a few other movie sources.
Also there is a music jukebox chanel which has never failed to find any song I have ever searched for!

 

One word. AirPlay.