Stitch, this article seems like it was written by you!
Apple TV Problems
He makes an observation that the media companies are probably just not playing ball with Apple. THe result is that the AppleTV will be a crippled device for the foreseeable future.
1 comment:
I think anyone who has an AppleTV has these same concerns. A lot of these concerns went away with the Boxee hack. I am no hack myself. I tried installing Linux on my PC and that was a nightmare. Plus I have no idea how to fix problems on Linux even though I have used Unix for years. But I digress. The Boxee hack was all prepackaged by the Unix guru's and all I had to do is install it on a patchstick USB drive and reboot the AppleTV. It went so smooth I thought Apple might have written it. Now it updates within AppleTV for any upgrades.
With Boxee the issue of not being able to play any format goes away. It can play files from any shared drive on your network anywhere in the house. It can play DVD's from the drive on you computer in another room if you want too. The issue of not working on standard def TV's is gone too since Boxee allows you to scale the screen anyway you like. Letterbox, clipped letterbox or anything in between. The defaults usually work fine. The AppleTV squishes the horizontal direction if it is standard TV and using a standard TV source. Funny it does not do this for video bought on iTunes though.
The Netflix player Roku ($100)only plays a portion of their library. A very small portion. So when you hear how great it is, these are primarily very out of date movies or unknown movies.
The iTunes video on demand library is fairly large and somewhat up to date. But it still seems like some movies take a while to get to iTunes even after being released to DVD. Others do not allow renting only purchasing the video, (at prices like $20 a movie). I'm not in that market at all. I watch a movie once typically.
The only missing link I see is being able to use my USB over the air digital tuner in the AppleTV so I can use it as a DVR with live TV. I can use my computer to do this but the software with the device is buggy and crashes a lot. When it works I can stream it to the AppleTV with Boxee but to setup recordings I need to be in the Den. There are programs which do this such as MythTV (open source) and has an on screen controls. Maybe the Hackintosh people will come up with a fix for this.
So I am happy with AppleTV but it cannot be your primary video source just yet.
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