Some thoughts on Apple TV

I've been eyeing the Apple TV for a while now, thinking I'd like to get one, but since I have a perfectly good media streaming device already (the MG-35), I haven't been in a big rush to purchase one. A buddy of mine from work picked one up a few weeks ago and I convinced him that he should let me borrow it for a couple of days so I could try it out. I wanted to try it out first hand before deciding if I wanted to drop a couple hundred bucks (plus) on it. In the end, I still think I'd like to get one, but I'm not rushing out the door to grab it right now. I felt it came up a bit short on some of its functionality, but I think the flaws I saw could all (easily) be fixed with some software tweaks.

First off, I was a bit surprised at how heavy it was, when I first picked it up. I'm used to the MG-35 which is super light since I didn't bother to put a hard drive into it, plus the Apple TV is made out of aluminum - likely because it has no fan and the aluminum is used as a heat sink - boy does it get warm! I connected it to my TV using the extra HDMI cable I had run through the wall for 'future expansion' and I was glad that I did. I could have used the component video cables and RCA audio cables I also had run through the wall, but I wanted to see what it would look like using the best transmission medium possible so... Turns out it's a good thing I used the HDMI cable because it seems the component inputs for my TV are faulty. I've got an email into Samsung support about that...

I fired it up and was able to navigate around immediately - it was very intuitive like most Apple products. The guy who owns the Apple TV had installed XBMC on it and that showed up as just another menu entry on the main menu. I immediately went into that because the thing I was most interested in was how well it could play movies I have stored on my server in the basement. I was impressed with the XBMC user interface. I tried adding the shared folder from my linux box in the basement but ran into some trouble. After puzzling over why it wasn't working for a couple of minutes, I realized that I had forgotten to connect to my wireless network - d'oh! I fixed that up and was browsing the network share in no time.

First up - try streaming Cars to the TV using the XBMC interface. Result - the movie streamed ok but the quality was actually a bit worse than when I use the MG-35 to do the same thing. Funny thing was, when I use the MG-35, I only use the RCA audio and video cables, and on the Apple TV I was using the HDMI cable. Keep in mind that the video I was streaming was far from HD quality, but I expected the same, or better, video quality and sadly I didn't get it. My next test was to try playing some movies that I could never get the MG-35 to play. Previously I had tried playing some movies through the MG-35 that I created with my camera (a Canon PowerShot S2 IS) but the device wouldn't do it. I had played around, using iMovie, saving the movies in different formats, but none of them would play through MG-35. I wanted to see if XBMC on the Apple TV would fare any better. It did better than the MG-35 for sure, but there were still some problems.

It played the mp4 file with no issues, but the video quality was absolute crap. Next I tried playing the AVI file that came directly from the camera - that was worse. For the first five seconds or so, the audio played perfectly, but the video was in slow motion, then the audio got really choppy and it just wasn't watchable. I'd call that a big fail for XBMC unfortunately. I was disappointed since I was hoping for an easy solution to play video made with the camera. I decided to move onto trying out the video playback through the Apple TV interface. Unfortunately the videos from my camera, which live in iPhoto and are playable through Quicktime on the mac, aren't able to be dragged and dropped into iTunes for some reason. That is the first thing that needs to be fixed - if the videos can live in iPhoto and be played with Quicktime, why can't they be synced to the Apple TV directly?! Anyways, I opened up iMovie and created a quick movie then exported it using Quicktime to the best quality .mov I could make. I was able to drag and drop that into iTunes with no issues. But...the damn movie wouldn't sync to the Apple TV - it said it was incompatible. WTF?! Back to iMovie and use the share option which creates an 'iTunes movie'. That took somewhere around 7-8 minutes (for a minute long clip) and voila, it synced to the Apple TV and played beautifully. Bit of a PITA to have to put the extra time in though.

Remote - kind of cheezy, could definitely be improved. I thought I'd be able to get around this by using the Remote App for my iPhone, but that was even less functional than the remote that came with the Apple TV. It wasn't even possible to get the Apple TV to play photos using the Remote App. That is the second thing that could easily be improved with a software update (for both the Apple TV and the iPhone app).

A pleasant surprise was that the Apple TV showed up as remote speakers for iTunes. That meant I could stream music to the TV, just like I do to the speakers connected to my Airport Express. It even displayed the album art for the song that was playing, a nice touch. While I'm talking about music, I do have one small beef - again something that could easily be fixed with a simple software update. You do have the option for a screen saver to kick in while listening to music, but the options for the screen saver are limited to photos, either your own, from a flickr account, or some Apple default pictures. Why, oh why, don't they have any iTunes visualizer effects included for the screen saver - something that would move with the music. That would be cool!

Photos - once you've done a sync with your computer, you can look at your photos on the Apple TV. They look good. You can also check out Flickr photos from any flickr account. I've got two problems with the Flickr integration: you can't log into your own flickr account so that means you're limited to public photos only, and you can't play videos that are stored on Flickr. Those are two things that can, and should be fixed. The ability to play the videos should already be present in the Apple TV since it can play YouTube videos - both are flash based. Of course, the iPhone can also play YouTube videos and it doesn't do flash, so perhaps they have an API into YouTube that accesses the videos in a different format. No reason they couldn't work that out with Yahoo for Flickr videos too...

Anyways, all in all, not a bad little device. Unfortunately it's not quite up-to-snuff when compared with other Apple devices, at least in my opinion. As I mentioned above, I think I'd still like to get one, but I think I'll wait until after Macworld in January to see if Steve has any updates planned for it. An optical drive for playing DVDs maybe? Not likely.

UPDATE: I've been informed that you don't actually get better quality from HDMI when compared to component video, you just get everything (audio, video and HDCP passthru) in one cable. :) Regardless - my component video inputs on my TV are still faulty.