The death of AppleTV....Popbox

[ntrigue]

I discovered the confusion. Those of us complaining are streaming all content to ATV. It's a miserable experience. I posted in another thread that my average experience includes menu lag of 20 seconds, play movie delay of 6 minutes, and a black screen when the movie ends for at least three minutes.

Often times I rip a movie and wish to view on ATV immediately. Do I wait 20 minutes to sync or 8 minutes to stream?

I have an 80GB but 300GB of movies.

 

[Lara F]

Not sure I understand the concerns about netflix/blockbuster. More options is always better than fewer options. But doesn't iTunes fill that precise niche with movie rentals?

Not without a $10/month subscription option. That's the whole reason for going with Netflix in the first place.

I'd love to be able to select whatever I felt like from the iTunes store but it's just too expensive in the end, and dumping cable to compensate isn't an option since I'd lose live sports and channels like HGTV.

 

[VTMac]

I discovered the confusion. Those of us complaining are streaming all content to ATV. It's a miserable experience. I posted in another thread that my average experience includes menu lag of 20 seconds, play movie delay of 6 minutes, and a black screen when the movie ends for at least three minutes.

Often times I rip a movie and wish to view on ATV immediately. Do I wait 20 minutes to sync or 8 minutes to stream?

I have an 80GB but 300GB of movies.

Then there is something wrong (as in technically broken) with your setup. I have 450 GB of movies and 100GB of music that stream to my AppleTV over 802.11G with 0 problems in over 2 years. In addition we rent an HD movie from iTunes about once a month. Average lag to start the rented move - about 2 minutes.

Average lag to start on of my own movies - about 8 seconds. Menus - maybe .5 sec lag. The absolute only thing that isn't smooth is rewind. But then I would never expect that to be smooth over 802.11G.

 

[fpnc]

I discovered the confusion. Those of us complaining are streaming all content to ATV. It's a miserable experience. I posted in another thread that my average experience includes menu lag of 20 seconds, play movie delay of 6 minutes, and a black screen when the movie ends for at least three minutes.

Often times I rip a movie and wish to view on ATV immediately. Do I wait 20 minutes to sync or 8 minutes to stream?

I have an 80GB but 300GB of movies.

I don't see those types of problems on my Apple TV. However, if you have encoded your own movies you need to make certain that they are prepared with streaming optimizations enabled. If you don't do that then the movies won't perform very well (very slow startup, slow access to chapters, etc.).

 

[Michael CM1]

This thing will be gone in two years. You won't be able to buy a new TV without an Internet connection within a few years. As long as the makers allow app development without too much inhibition, there will be no need for extra boxes. This is why I think AppleTV's future is in the software, not hardware. If TVs come with WiFi and an SD slot, you don't need another box. Charge $20 or whatever to download the AppleTV software or just include it in the TV's price.

With the extremely large SD cards on the horizon, there won't be a need for a hard disk drive. I have my dad's ATV set up to stream video, which isn't a problem when the software doesn't tell the device that the video is incompatible -- even on iTunes-purchased files.