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Just ordered a apple tv cant wait!

E

eddtr1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 23, 2009
23
0
Hi all,

just wanted to say that i have just ordered apple tv - should get i in a day or so! My sister had one and i loved it.

I am currently handbraking all my vids to support it. I have turned my house into a apple love fest! I used to be a windows guy - then i got a macbook pro and now i will never go back.

I know there is alot of negativity to apple tv - people see it as a pet project and the like but it is fantastic isnt it?

I was wondering how do you guys use yours - do you use it all the time or just every now and again? do you rent films? or just use it for podcasts? - lets have a apple tv loving session!
 
I recently purchased a used one off of ebay (couldn't afford a new one) and also should be receiving it shortly. Like you, I also can't wait to get my hands on it!! Can't wait to also install ATVFlash and release some of it's hidden potential. I too have been busy converting all of my dvd's into the apple tv format by way of Handbrake.:D I'm getting mine, which is probably the reason i don't mind it being used, for my three year old daughter so i can have her watching her disney movies and such on our tv in the living room. This will free up my iMac in my office, if i happen to be using it. Also i don't want to have to deal with looking for dvd's and also wondering if she scratched them. Enjoy your Apple TV!!!!!!!!!!! I'm sure i will enjoy mine!!!!!!!!!!!
 
I can honestly say my ATV is one of the best purchases I've ever made, not a single day goes by that I don't use it. If I'm not watching TV shows or films on it then I'm just sat there watching Youtube or podcasts, it's great:)
 
roidy said:
I can honestly say my ATV is one of the best purchases I've ever made, not a single day goes by that I don't use it. If I'm not watching TV shows or films on it then I'm just sat there watching Youtube or podcasts, it's great:)
Click to expand...

+1
 
OK, so I'm interested in the apple tv with ATV are there any formats that are not supported?

also how much can you stream and how much has to be on the actual apple TV? 160 gig seems rather small to me.
 
Larpy said:
OK, so I'm interested in the apple tv with ATV are there any formats that are not supported?
Click to expand...

Out of the box ATV only plays h.264 in a mp4/m4v container encoded to a very narrow set of apple specs.

Hacked and patched then most formats can be played as long as the ATV can handle the bitrate.

also how much can you stream and how much has to be on the actual apple TV? 160 gig seems rather small to me.
Click to expand...

It's completely upto you, you can stream everything and keep nothing on the ATV's hard drive which is what I do. Or you can store as much as you want on the ATV's hard drive and stream the rest.
 
zedsdead said:
Great product. Just wish apple gave it some attention.
Click to expand...

Agreed - its a shame as I really like it. It needs a boost! Make it an Atom based machine with ION and it would fly.

I have about 375 movies - 175 of which are 720p - and average between 2GB and 8GB, I have about 90GB used on mine. I stream the rest of the stuff to it, (500 odd TV episodes of various TV shows) and about 12,500 MP3's. The movies that are synced are ones I or my partner enjoy and don't have to worry about stuttering (which annoys the hell out of me - which happens sometimes - I think its space chatter on my WiFi ;) )

pac
 
I love my 160 :apple:TV and am waiting and waiting and waiting for a new model. I use it only a couple times a week as I'm not home much and usually watching sports when the TV is on.

I have an external 1 terabyte drive attached to my iMac which keeps all my media. It's almost full which sucks (60 gigs music and the rest movies and some TV shows for my kid). So I mostly stream movies which isn't a big deal because my home is cat5 wired. What I DO keep on my :apple:TV are all my music and photos; this leaves enough space for 30 or 40 movies. I manually transfer movies to and from it on occasion and bring it with me to my GF's house who loves crappy horror movies.

For me the biggest reason I have it is for the convenience of having everything I own accessible with a remote click. I HATE clutter! I don't want to look at racks of DVDs or have to rummage around to find anything. I don't want to waste physical space on what amounts to a bunch of 0s and 1s. Yes it took a while to transfer everything but these days I rip about one or two movies a week so it's not a big deal. AND I have everything forever.

Even my GF who doesn't give two turds about my iPad, iPhone, or anything techy in the slightest really loves the :apple:TV so maybe I'll give it to her once a new model comes out...
 
Larpy said:
OK, so I'm interested in the apple tv with ATV are there any formats that are not supported?

also how much can you stream and how much has to be on the actual apple TV? 160 gig seems rather small to me.
Click to expand...

If you hack your ATV, you can play pretty much anything.
As for hd size, you can easily increase it with a hack.

This wiki contains a lot of info on hacking your ATV.
 
Robbadore64 said:
I love my 160 :apple:TV and am waiting and waiting and waiting for a new model. I use it only a couple times a week as I'm not home much and usually watching sports when the TV is on.

I have an external 1 terabyte drive attached to my iMac which keeps all my media. It's almost full which sucks (60 gigs music and the rest movies and some TV shows for my kid). So I mostly stream movies which isn't a big deal because my home is cat5 wired. What I DO keep on my :apple:TV are all my music and photos; this leaves enough space for 30 or 40 movies. I manually transfer movies to and from it on occasion and bring it with me to my GF's house who loves crappy horror movies.

For me the biggest reason I have it is for the convenience of having everything I own accessible with a remote click. I HATE clutter! I don't want to look at racks of DVDs or have to rummage around to find anything. I don't want to waste physical space on what amounts to a bunch of 0s and 1s. Yes it took a while to transfer everything but these days I rip about one or two movies a week so it's not a big deal. AND I have everything forever.

Even my GF who doesn't give two turds about my iPad, iPhone, or anything techy in the slightest really loves the :apple:TV so maybe I'll give it to her once a new model comes out...
Click to expand...

I strongly recommend getting a Drobo should you need more space.
 
We have 2 Apple TVs and use them every day. The one upstairs is great for streaming internet radio, checking out the odd thing on YouTube and playing the kids' TV shows. I've also Handbraked the kids' DVDs and then we don't have to fumble around with the discs, as others have mentioned.
The one downstairs is in a dedicated media room and it rocks! We buy some TV shows (especially Sci-fi ones) off of iTunes and the 5.1 sound is amazing. We have it going through an Pioneer Elite receiver and B&W 600 series speakers. The Apple TV turns your TV into a giant digital photo frame. It's also super for renting HD movies. You will totally enjoy yours!
 
tom1971 said:
If you hack your ATV, you can play pretty much anything.
As for hd size, you can easily increase it with a hack.

This wiki contains a lot of info on hacking your ATV.
Click to expand...

I see from the ATV web site that it is possible to add an extra drive and has web ability

How difficult are they to hack??

Pretty sure I'm getting one but may wait to see if they upgrade them first
 
I like my Apple TV a lot. I use it most often as a music player. The ability to control it wirelessly via the Remote app on my iPhone is brilliant. I can sit outside on my patio and play any of the music in my library through my remote speakers. I chose to sync almost all my music to my 40 GB Apple TV, but I stream almost all the video from an external drive attached to my Mac.

I do find the limited number of supported video formats to be a problem. I solved this by also buying a $120 WDTV Live box. It will stream my 1080p blu-ray rips, mkv files, raw DVD rips, etc. The user interface is nowhere near as nice as the Apple TV, but it gets the job done.
 
Not to ruin your excitement but I do have the 160gb ATV and I love it too. I hacked it to include boxee so I can play Pandora since I paid for Pandora one. However for movies, I got netflix with blu-ray for $10/month unlimited. Wonder how ATV compares with this? Probably the convenience of watching New Released movies on demand? I'm trying to justify the prices.
 
Got mine

well i got it and set it up yesterday and its fab. It is quite a eye opener as well. I though my Itunes library was quite organised but when ya see it on the screen you notive all the things which are not tagged correctly like artists one with a full stop and the other without so you have it twice will have to sort that.

Now i have apple tv I am in a mad rush to convert all my vids into mp4. Handbrake is great for this but tagging content is another issue. I have tried them all - iflicks, subler, metax and a few more none of them seem to do the job. tagging films is preety straigh forward however tv shows is a different matter - does any one know of a good tagger which can deal with tv shows. THe good old xbmc was brill at getting the info there must be a mp4 tagger out there which can do it. Metaz shows some promise as well!
 
I used mine last night while a friend was over, listening to music from the Mac mini upstairs, plus messing with videos (showed him iTunes Extras and iTunes LPs) and watching stupid videos on YouTube.

I would love a Drobo, but two things concern me, 1) the price, yeah they're cheap for what they do, but for home use, laying down about $500 for the device then however much for the hard drives ontop. I do like the data redundancy however, I did have a bit of a scare the other day. 2) The noise. My Mac mini is in the bedroom and is fairly quiet. OK the hard disks hooked up to it can click and whirr away, but usually fall asleep so don't disturb me in bed. I've head the drobo can be quite loud and also the LED indicator bar on the front is very bright.

I'll probably end up getting one though - I'm fed up of every few years having to reorganize my library to make it future proof for expansion, the Drobo takes that problem out of the equasion.

pac
 
Larpy said:
I see from the ATV web site that it is possible to add an extra drive and has web ability

How difficult are they to hack??

Pretty sure I'm getting one but may wait to see if they upgrade them first
Click to expand...

It is really easy to do. The click on the remote control will do the trick. The patchstick.ca product includes regular updates.
 
roidy said:
I can honestly say my ATV is one of the best purchases I've ever made, not a single day goes by that I don't use it. If I'm not watching TV shows or films on it then I'm just sat there watching Youtube or podcasts, it's great:)
Click to expand...

Same here. As well as my stuff, I've put all my kids shows and films on it. They're only 4 and 5 but can navigate the menus easily... It's heavily used! :) I did pop ATVFlash on it and I'm using an external drive, just wish apple officially allowed that. Great bit of kit though. Enjoy :)
 
I find MetaX is ok for films - in fact alot of them are fine with films which is good however when it comes to TV metaX is not great and thats where alot of them fall down!

iDentify 2 on the other hand is looking promising for TV - so still experimenting with that!
 
What exactly is you problem with iFlicks and TV Shows? If the filenames are reasonable you should get pretty good results.

If you give me a few more information, I should be able to point you in the right direction on how to achieve what you want with iFlicks.
 
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