Jen1977ni

Anyone got that Apple TV? If so, is it any good and does it require a subscription or do you just buy the device and off you go!?

http://www.apple.com/au/appletv/

EvannTel

Yes, I have Apple TV
Yes, it is good
No, its doesn't need a subscription.
Yes, buy it and off you go if..........

1) you have a TV with a spare HDMI input
2) Wifi network at home
3) Computer with iTunes account

teambwr47

Yep had for a long time and its great.

We stream all our music and movies to our house media system via it and rent movies from Apple on a regular basis.

You need an itunes account to rent stuff but you only pay for what you buy or rent.

Its a great device but works best if you have a complete apple set up at home ie. wireless device etc.

Also use our iphones/ipads as remote controls

Jen1977ni

Excellent, sounds like it could be very very good...yes we're an apple house:

3 iphones
3 ipods
1 ipad
1 mac air
...oh and a partridge in a pear tree lol

EvannTel

Ok thats all great, the "weakness" I see if the Air as this will be where the iTunes accounts sits.
The new ATV's don't have internal storage and Air's dont have a vaste amount and video quickly takes up a lot of disk space - especially HD. It won't be an issue if you want to rent only but if you intend building a movie library you can access on air, ipad and atv then you'll need storage and prefereably NAS storage; but this is cheap and easy these days.

Kim67

Yep, had ours for about four years. We didn't even bother to have tv connected for the two and a bit years we were in Dubai. We just put all our movies and tv series downloads on the Apple TV and watched heaps of stuff via youtube on the Apple TV.

fish.01

Got the new apple tv last week and impressed with the streaming over my wireless network...except can't get it to see my itunes account through home sharing....google reveals a fair few people with the same issue....yet to crack it, seems like a complicated issue.

Kim67

Hows the search function on the remote? Do you still have to arrow up and down to every single letter you want to type when you search youtube?

fish.01

yes....it auto searches as you type each letter so often don't need to type all of them...think I can use my iphone or ipad to control it as well when I get around to it. ipad keyboard will be a lot easier.

Kim67

Excellent, might have to upgrade then one of these days as that's the only thing that peeves me with the original model, you spend so long typing stuff into it on that remote. It does auto search as you type, but if you're looking for something very specific, it can take ages to type it all in and being able to use the iphone keyboard to control it would be good.

newjersey

can it be used to stream video off a hard drive? I have quite a collection of movies and TV shows (200+ DVDs worth, then run out of disk space) and a s/load of music spread out between two windows desktops and a mac laptop. I have one of the desktops hooked up to a big screen TV via HDMI cable, but want to change the whole thing to the Apple TV and be done with Windows (a whole other story)

Centurion

You can stream, but only from iTunes libraries. On the plus you can have many different libraries on different types of machines open and have access to the media on all. However, iTunes supports MP4 and H264 formats so if your rips are AVI's then you won't be able to import them into your itunes without converting.

Essentially no though, you can't just plug in a HDD to the unit. However, the first generation apple TV has a HDD in it and also a usb port which can be unlocked via third party software and will happily accept a HDD. I still have the first generation and prefer it immensely for those reasons.

Ka Ora!

Had an Apple TV since they came out, Excellent For what it is, Anyone thats having Storage issues due to space could also consider one of the Newer routers with Hard drives and that also have an onboard "iTunes Streaming Server" like the "Netgear Stora" replacing the need to have a a Mac or Windows based machine switched on all the time. One library lots of machines.

DunRoaminTheUK

You can hack it to run Boxee. Then it would be worth having (ironically when it is no longer running Apple software)....

ozzieeagle

I would hang on Jen.... massive changes coming in IPTV next year. Foxtel will really come under attack.

To be truthful the best way to go at present is with an Acer Revo, then you can run anything and everything through it and the whole lot is upgradeable. The downside of this is you have to configure it yourself.

It will run all the programmes needed, stream, download, arrange torrents, and Newsgroup downloads (which is the best way to download movies ). The new model now comes with twin tuners so its a HD box as well.

All in all it does everything the Apple TV does, plus a an infinite amount more.

To start yourself off have a play with this, which is the easiest media solution out there, and if your brave you can upgrade to the ultimate level which is XBMC.

For now give Boxee a play and run any downloaded media through it and be amazed. Like I said XBMC is even better than Boxee. There is a reason why people in the know with Apple TV upgrade their systems to run Boxee. You and anyone else can trial that right now


http://www.boxee.tv/download\

BTW the reason the Acer Revo is so good compared to any other media based computer, is it comes with a hand sized remote control with a qwerty keyboard on one side and a universal TV remote on the other. Plus it's small enough to attach to the back of a TV.. Then there's all the connections. 3 HDMI and 6 USB.s