Apple TV - is it worth it?
 

Any thoughts?
40GB?

If it is an Apple product, it must rule! I was thinking about buying one too.

Mitch

Brad Gosse has got one and he says it's pretty cool :)

DH

depends on how much ipod video you have

i've never even heard of it!

The first day after Apple TV began shipping a bunch of sharp-as-a-tack
coder types hacked Apple's new set top box to shreds:

Non-Apple TV owners can enjoy the out of box experience by viewing the
opening video which one crafty person ripped from the hard drive and
posted in all of it's 720p glory. You can also download the Quartz
Composer Screen Saver and the Now Playing Screen. And if you're truly
hard-core you can download the entire Apple TV OS, and (conceivably)
install it on another Mac.

But this is just scratching the Apple TV surface.

True hackers will want to immediately take it apart (photos) and
upgrade the wimpy 40GB HDD to 80 or 120GB - it's a standard 2.5-inch
notebook mechanism (another HDD upgrade tutorial is here).

If you really want to hack it to the next level you can play Xvid
movies on Apple TV, but it ain't pretty and involves removing the HDD
(covered above) and un-breaking SSH (using Perian and DropBear) so you
can access the Apple TV remotely.

If that's too much hassle for you there's a solution to automatically
convert Xvid, Divx, WMV files to Apple TV format, and then import them
into iTunes with a convenient Automator workflow.

You can even turn a Mac mini into an Apple TV or an Apple TV into a
Web server (by installing Apache).

I am going to pick one up.

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

any ideas if there will be a 1080p version anytime soon?

I think I will wait for the 1080p

Mitch

i will get one... ;)

A whole 40GB of storage! Wow-WEE!

No way..

1080p, or 720p doesn't necessarily mean that the video will be amazing 'HD quality'. The bitrate is a very important element to the 'perceived' quality. The apple store movies are 720p, but the bitrate (I think it's ~3-5 Mbps) is 'near DVD quality'. I would guess that the end quality is going to look lackluster on an HDtv. To put this into prespective, a DVD has a max bitrate of ~9Mbps. An HD DVD has a max bitrate of 26Mbps and blu-ray has a max of 52Mbps. It would be nice to buy a DVD version of a particular movie, the apple store version, the Blu-ray, or HD-DVD version. Then compare the picture quality.

Here is a nice article if you're interested.

The appletv looks like a cool idea, but why plug it into an HDtv?

And that 40G drive. I don't get that either, but maybe I am missing something.

me too...