thinking of getting an apple tv..few q's

[mrweirdo]

I've been looking at the apple tv online lately being very tempted to order one however I have a few questions about it. It also seems that no one sells the thing except for apple stores themselves so I haven't seen it in person.

I have a lot of self captured episodes of tv shows(ex: familyguy, simpsons, south park, etc)in H.264 format on Hard Drive hooked to my mac. All these shows are 4x3 as well. Does the apple tv automatically stretch the content to 16:9 to fit the widescreen tv? I have a panasonic 32" lcd and would hate for the shows to get stretched like iTunes does on my iPod Touch.

The other question is because my tv is a 1080i set it has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 and wont accept anything else as it will not fill the screen properly otherwise. Does anyone know if the appletv supports it?

Thanks I hope to join the mass tv users shortly

 

[mikenike192]

first of all an apple tv is an amazing product i use it every day. To answer your first question it does not stretch the your picture all my scrubs episodes are 4:3 and it doesnt stretch. But for your second question I really have no idea, sorry.

Also just buy a refurbed 40gb one and stream everything over your network it works great on my wireless g network

 

[chuckles:)]

it has a 1080i output setting, which should work fine. the video content will only be 720p, but it will still fill the screen and look great.

 

[mrweirdo]

thanks for the responses. Right now my plan is to indeed get the 40gb and stream content over my Gigabit wired lan to the device so I don't need the extra space I was tempted at one point to build my own mythtv htpc box but with some many unknowns in hardware/software compatibility it makes the apple tv the perfect choice.