Any Apple TV users?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been looking for a good solution to get my DVD’s onto a computer and then watch them on my HDTV. But there’s never really been a great way of doing it. I have an old laptop that I had hooked up and tried that, but it was a pain getting the resolution set up right, and then I had to have a wireless keyboard and mouse to operate it. It was a bit complicated for my Mother-in-law to work to just let the kids watch a movie. So I shelved that idea for a while.

Fast-forward to this past weekend when I happened to walk by an Apple TV in the mall. I’m not a huge Apple fan, but after looking around on the net a bit, it seems like this may fit what I want to do. Available with a large internal drive, so I don’t have to worry about streaming over a wireless connection, already set up to do some conversion of video for a TV format. HDMI interface, and hackable (if I get the gumption).

Are there any users of AppleTV out there now? Especially with the latest software upgrades? I understand there were some issues when it first came out (like anything), but has anyone recently started using one? How is the picture quality? Have you tried watching your own DVD’s that have been ripped? Any issues getting it to work with a wireless router that wasn’t an Airport?

Any advice, result, stories or opinions welcome.

Thanks!

2

I have an AppleTV. I’m a Mac guy though, so my experiences may not be the same as yours.

I also own an iPhone and several iPods, so the AppleTV was just an extension for me that made a ton of sense. I was used to the software (iTunes), everything was compatible, and I could play my iPhoto galleries and podcasts on my big screen TV. It was the perfect solution for me, save for 1 issue. It doesn’t play DivX, Xvid, AVIs, WMVs, or any other format popular for downloading (without hacking it, which I don’t want to do).

The picture looks marvelous on my 50" plasma. Renting high def content looks amazing to my eyes, and standard def stuff looks better than standard TV input. DVD content I rip to my computer looks somewhere in between the standard def and high def, but it’s definitely watchable and not distracting.

I had no issues getting it to work on my ASUS router.

I’m hoping that Apple opens up the AppleTV to developers like it did with the iPhone so I can get support for other codecs, but I’m not holding my breath. For now I use my AppleTV for movie rentals from iTunes, streaming video podcasts to watch on TV instead of my iPhone, and watching my ripped DVDs. For downloaded content, I still plug my laptop into my TV rather than transcode to an AppleTV friendly format. This is just a personal preference, and obviously you could convert the video if its easier for you. If you’re already comfortable with iTunes I’d say this is an easy call, but if not, there’s other media extenders that are less expensive and more capable, however they’re not as user friendly.

3

Thanks wasson, that’s exactly the type of feedback I wanted. Luckily Handbrake has a pre-defined Apple Tv output format, so since I have to rip them all anyway it’s not a big issue to just save them in that format while I’m doing it. May take me a month to get them all done, but I’m in no hurry. Part of me was dissapointed in the lack of support for other media formats, but then I thought about it and even if something is in .avi format, it could still have several different video codexies that it used to encode it. So I think Apple just said “Screw it” and left those out.

4

I found if I ripped using Handbrake’s ‘classic’ format, I could watch them thru the xbox360 too.

The Apple TV + a machine that’s on + iTunes is okay.

An xbox360 with Twonky Media and a file server is okay.

Neither of them are as easy and convenient as my Evil Xbox running XBMC…unfortunately, it’s stuck in Standard Definition. :frowning: It could pretty much play any video on any fileshare I had in the house. The others want to you stand on one foot and play nice within their little restrictive kingdom.

5

I use a dedicated Mac Mini. So, I can play essentially any video file, and DVDs without ripping. Oh, and watch and record TV, using EyeTV.

6

Thanks all. I went ahead and bought one last night. I figured that it looked good enough to at least give it a try. I had a few movies that I had ripped to AppleTV format already, so if I tested it and it either didn’t work that well, or the resolution was crappy or anything else, I’d just return it.

I have to say so far I’m very happy. I got the 160GB version just so that I could sync the movies to it and not have to worry about leaving iTunes running all the time on my laptop. I was surprised at how well it streamed a movie from my laptop over the wireless network. I’m very happy with it right now and I’m at a loss as to why this isn’t more popular and talked about. The only thing I can think of is that if you had a huge library of movie files already ripped in the wrong format it’d be a pain to re-encode them. Since I’m basically starting from scratch it’s not that big a deal to me. I have to do all my DVD’s anyway. I am keeping the original movie rip on a separate backup drive so that if I ever have to re-encode I at least don’t have to re-rip.

I thought about the XBOX 360 option, but it looked like just a little bit too much work. With two kids (3 & 1), my free time is limited. The AppleTV took about 5 minutes to get from the box to watching a movie. Now granted if I hadn’t already set things up before hand in the right format ect, then it might have been different.

7

My experience pretty much parallels Wasson’s. Interesting note: A program recorded on my TiVo, transcoded into iTunes via TDM or TiVo To Go, and watched on the same TV through my AppleTV looks much better than the native recording on the TiVo.

Take some time to play with smart playlists in iTunes and iPhoto; Syncing via a smart playlist allows you to do things like sync over the last 30 pictures you’ve shot, or the three newest unwatched episodes of a favorite TV show.

8

I’ve had an AppleTV (160GB) for a year now, and I really like it. I have it connected to my TV via HDMI, and the quality is pretty good. I’ve ripped about 100 of my DVDs and generally just copy four or five DVDs to an external hard drive, then start the encoding before I go to sleep or just as I leave for work. I’ve tried:
[ul][li]VisualHub (shareware)[/li][li]Handbrake (freeware)[/li][li]elgato Turbo.264 (hardware)[/li][li]eyeTV’s semi-automatic encoding (which I think is just using Quicktime)[/ul][/li]Being the way I am, I’ve been keeping records, and it seems to me that using Handbrake’s AppleTV preset with 1100 - 1300 kbps or its “Sony PSP” preset, again at 1100-1300 kbps is a pretty good way to have quality approaching an upsampled DVD, with a size of about 1GB per 100 minutes. When ripping interlaced movies (more often on TV series), I choose the fastest deinterlacing, but that just about doubles the time it takes to encode.

The Turbo.264 dongle almost works as well as its advertisements – it reduces CPU usage from about 150% to about 25-30%. But it encodes just barely faster than Handbrake (which uses ffmpegx, I believe), and it results in marginally larger files. So I’m not so sure it was a good purchase.

However, now I have about 40 movies and about 100 episodes* of various TV shows, either ripped from my own DVDs or purchased from iTunes**. I haven’t gotten around to rending an HD movie from iTunes, so I don’t know the degree of their HD-ness, but the SD shows I’ve purchased look like they have less detail than the shows I rip from DVDs.

Truth be told, I’ve gradually stopped watching physical DVDs, and end up using my Blu-Ray player just for Blu-Ray disks. For DVDs, watching them on AppleTV is much more convenient.

  • Since it syncs with my iTunes library, and since I’m beginning to run out of space on my main hard drive, I don’t keep everything loaded at once. I’m looking to replace that drive with a 750GB – they’re coming down in price.

** In case you’re curious - you can actually back up and delete iTunes purchases, and then later add them back in, and they’ll still work.

9

Thanks everyone. I have to say that I become more enamored of it the more I play with it. I do about the same thing groo. I rip 4 or 5 movies then set my laptop to encoding at night. Then when I leave for work, I start the sync to the AppleTV. The initial period of getting everything onto the AppleTV will take a while, but after that it won’t be that bad. There are also some good podcasts out there that I have download so that there’s something on there for me to watch too.

SuperNelson what version of Tivo do you have that lets you get stuff onto the AppleTV? I can’t think of an easy way of doing that short of capturing the video out of my Tivo with a hardware device, then encoding it for the AppleTV…which doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Anyone know how to clear out the “recent” list from the YouTube section? I …ahhh…may have gotten bored last night and watched a few videos that I’d rather not have stay on that list.

Yet another question. Any way of finding out which releases of a DVD may be un-rippable? I tried to pull over The Phantom of the Opera last night and the DVD shows up blank on my computer. I really don’t want to do some crazy cracking thing to get the movie, but is there a site that maybe lists a different release that I could buy that would be rippable?

10

The setup in our house may be a little, umm, excessive. Three TV’s, three TiVo’s, one 40Gb AppleTV, an iMac, and a couple of laptops. All but the laptops are connected via Ethernet. Two TiVo’s are Series 2 model 2400 units, and one is a TiVo HD (*). For the most part, I stream content directly from the iMac to the AppleTV, as 40Gb doesn’t really touch the size of the library. This does mean I usually have to walk over and wake up the iMac before I sit down to watch TV, but that’s no big deal.

To get content from the TiVo’s into iTunes, I use TiVo Download Manager (TDM). This freely downloadable program allows you to browse the “Now Playing” list on the TiVo’s, select programs, and queue them up for batch downloading. As each program is downloaded, TDM automagically imports it into iTunes, along with the tag information (like program name, date, synopsis, etc.). It’s really a simple program to use. The TiVo supported option for Macs is Roxio’s Toast with TiVo to Go capability. I have purchased and used Roxio’s solution, but it is a two-step process. You have to download the program, then separately instruct it to transcode each one to MP4, then drag the program into iTunes. If you’re running Windows, TiVo to Go is part of TiVo’s TiVo Desktop software. If I recall, the TiVo Desktop software is free, but regardless of whether you run a Mac or Windows, you need to pay a nominal (like $10) fee to set up your TiVo account to allow downloads.

Both solutions result in a video file that is viewable in iTunes, and is compliant with TiVo’s DRM obligations. Both solutions result in a video file that is watermarked, and easily traced back to the TiVo subscriber’s account. Roxio’s solution is even sold on TiVo’s website.

Another note: My iTunes library is much larger than the stock drive which shipped with my iMac. I have relocated the iTunes library and the iTunes database to an external Western Digital MyBook hard drive. As these are not infallible, I have an identical WD MyBook drive that I use as a backup. The vast majority of the content is unchanged from day to day (and month to month), so I just wrote a short rsync script to synchronize the contents of the two drives. Unless I’ve added a whole lot of content, this only takes five or ten minutes. The resulting backup has been tested, since I upgraded to a larger MyBook a few months ago. I simply shut down iTunes, unmounted the Media drive, and renamed the backup drive “Media” before restarting iTunes. Worked like a charm. Then I took the new, larger MyBook, named it “Backup”, and that night ran rsync again while I slept.

  • The TiVo HD is in the Series III product line, and is new. TiVo’s documentation says that TiVo HD’s support TiVo to Go, but I have not confirmed this myself, either with HD or standard quality content.

You go to the YouTube section, then to “History.” If you scroll all the way up above the topmost entry, there should be an item that says “Clear History.”

11

Thanks SuperNelson I found that setting to clear stuff out.

And it actually sounds like our setup is close. I have 4 DirectTv DVR (which is were the issue lies) in the house, both wired and wireless for the two laptops, a 500 GB NAS drive which I’ll be upgrading to a 1TB drive here in a month or so, and now the AppleTV to get my movies onto my HD set.

Like you, my iTunes library points to the external drive for the physical location of all the music, photo, and movie files. Once I get the new drive I’ll be doing a regular backup. I like the Western Digital MyWorld Book mostly because it’s one of the few ethernet-ready storage drives. Most of the ones you see are USB or FireWire.

I tend to still call our DVR’s “Tivo” even though DirectTV stopped actually partnering with Tivo years ago. So I don’t have those options available to me. Right now the only way to get anything off the Tivo is to use a DVD recorder…which I can do, but not for everyday type stuff.

Thanks for all the help and advice!