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AppleTV/Other Networked TV device
joshua1
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi all,
First off, does anyone have an AppleTV and can comment on how it works?
I ask because as an Australian, i have been chosen by my government to spend spend spend and they have graciously given me money to do so.
I don't really need anything at the moment, so I thought an AppleTV could be useful. Also, i am a Apple Whore, and most of my house is chockfull of apple products, to the degree that I can play stream music from my computer to the living room, to be controlled by my phone, etc etc etc.
But, i have also heard the AppleTV is locked up pretty damn tight. Now, im not advocating piracy, but over the years I have ammassed quite a collection of .avi's that i have ripped off my own DVDs. I would dearly love to play these on my TV at whim. Is this possible with and AppleTV?
Is there any other device that has onboard storage, is wireless and has HDMI out? Are they simple, and not behemoth?
Is my idea completely ludicrous?
First off, does anyone have an AppleTV and can comment on how it works?
I ask because as an Australian, i have been chosen by my government to spend spend spend and they have graciously given me money to do so.
I don't really need anything at the moment, so I thought an AppleTV could be useful. Also, i am a Apple Whore, and most of my house is chockfull of apple products, to the degree that I can play stream music from my computer to the living room, to be controlled by my phone, etc etc etc.
But, i have also heard the AppleTV is locked up pretty damn tight. Now, im not advocating piracy, but over the years I have ammassed quite a collection of .avi's that i have ripped off my own DVDs. I would dearly love to play these on my TV at whim. Is this possible with and AppleTV?
Is there any other device that has onboard storage, is wireless and has HDMI out? Are they simple, and not behemoth?
Is my idea completely ludicrous?
joshua1 on
0
Posts
B.net: Kusanku
It's as good as the source material.
Anyone know if you can use it to look at mounted drives? I have most of my media mounted on a 750GB external HDD, connected to my airport. It would be really sweet if it could work of that, without fiddling, as I like having the HDD available to all the PCs in my unit (something like 6 nowadays!) with out plugging and etc
one thing though, i seem to be getting "network errors" every few seconds. I think it must be dropped frames or something. Its looking damn good though, so is there a way I can get those messages to hide? (if there isn't a way to make them stop happening?)
I did up the buffer from 400-600, if that does anything good/bad.
Things to consider:
The absolute best way to use it is to rip your own dvds/hd-dvds/blurays - this takes time.
It uses h.264 mov and nothing else... you have to commit to the format in order to exploit it to it's fullest.
If you are getting your own movies then you shouldn't have to hack it, play by the apple rules and it makes things easier.
To use it properly you need to have a computer with itunes running, then you stream movies from it to the appletv (it's hard drive is tiny tiny)
I actually have two appletvs and about to get a third, one is wired in my living room via gigabit and one is wireless via N upstairs.
The library is sitting on three each terabyte drives in a Mac Pro... 1043 movies, some tv stuff bought from itunes and a crap load of music. I rarely use it for anything other then movies and I watch a ton of them.
It works well (up to 720p/23.976 frames a second) but it's really a process you have to commit to (not like downloading xvids and mapping a network drive and calling it a day)
A good side benefit is that the movies that will play on appletv will also play on the xbox360 (And possibly the PS3)
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!
I have all three, the PS3, Xbox360s and Appletvs.
The scaler in the 360 sucks, standard resolution dvd looks next to horrible on my 1080p. I would put that at the bottom of device list unless you like the games and xboxlive.
I have never actually tried movies on the ps3, couldn't get streaming quite right and the drive is too small to be useful in my setup. As a bluray player though it's damn nice.
I was toying with the PS3 last night, and I found even if I downloaded the ep i wanted (American Dad, if this is important) to the PS3 HD, it still looked like it was dropping frames. Whats up with that?