Apple TV: I’m not convinced
Apple is upbeat about Apple TV, shipping soon for NZ$498 including GST. It integrates with iTunes to synch audio-visual content — TV shows, music and photos — from up to a handful of computers to a widescreen TV, wirelessly. Apple says it’s going to be as revolutionary as the iMac and the iPod. We all have multimedia content on our hard drives, says Apple; so much that many of us buy external drives to accommodate it (I have an 80GB hard drive on my laptop and only 2GB to spare; most of that 74GB of data is iTunes content). But having just done a BitTorrent experiment with a TV show download, I’m not convinced Apple is right about the source of our future entertainment. If video content on your PC is TV, it’s a step back to the days of the test card. Apple TV requires video content to be iTunes-compatible and, as I found with the .avi file I downloaded, getting multimedia content to actually play is about as much fun as staring at a dumb photo of a kid and a clown all afternoon. None of the three players (Windows Media Player 11, QuickTime Player 7 or InterVideo Win DVD 4) on my multimedia laptop would play an .avi file before I’d figured out that a plug-in video codec was required and had downloaded it. Worse still, none provided an error message to explain why I had audio but no video. Trying to import the video file into iTunes was also fruitless, and again no clue was given. Google saved the day again. Real ‘TV on demand’ would be plug-and-play, but in a world of multiple standards and crappy technology, normal service isn’t likely to be resumed for quite a while. Until then, when I want TV on demand I’ll watch a DVD.
posted by Chris Bell at 2:14 PM
8 Comments:
More importantly, how old is that kid now, and did she grow up to be hot?
Llew, you stole some of my thoughts exactly.
I remember seeing that 'testcard' when I was a kid over 30 years ago.
She's probably some middle-aged trout now cooking scones for the WI.
And don't you think that toy of her's with the stary eyes was a bit scary?
darren said...
"She's probably some middle-aged trout now cooking scones for the WI."
Unlike us, obviously; driving around in our Aston Martins, dressed in Savile Row threads and far too cool to be a member of any club or association.
I'm pleased both Darren and Llew have managed to cut through the irrelevance to get straight to the important bits. All I really remember about the test card girl and her kooky clown was asking my brother if there was anything on TV, as he flicked through the three channels:
"Test card... test card... and 'All Our Yesterdays'."
Them were the days.
Hey Chris,
I'm guessing that the codec you were missing was the XVid one. It happens to be the codec that the majority of downloaded video off BitTorrent uses. I agree that without XVid support the AppleTV doesn't look like a very good deal. That said, I'd be very keen on something with the usability of AppleTV as well as XVid Support and network access.
There are things like the TVisto or MVisto [1] which go a long way but, having looked at the manual, I'm guessing the usability was crap.
I was thinking of rolling my own home theatre pc but it priced up at about $1600. Would give me complete control though. If I don't like wha t it does then I can just mod the source!
[1] www.digizone.co.nz lookup Multimedia Player.
There do appear to be some solutions for getting AVIs to play in iTunes although I've not had any need to try until now.
I think the point about the Apple TV though is that in the US market at least, it's the natural companion for the iTunes Store. Purchase, download and play is just about as easy as you can get, provided you have some good bandwidth at your disposal. But this thing is likely to sell a whole lot more units if torrent files are also supported.
Roll on "late February" so we can hear from some early adopters re: supported formats.
Which is why VLC Media Player is damn handy for generally playing whatever you throw at it. I've been playing around with running videos from the PC to my TV for ages. It's potentially a fantastic technology, but still a way off being accessible to your average Joe. Apple TV may help, but as you point out, the huge number of formats out there make it difficult. I have about 100GB of video content on my hard drive - I'm not really keen to buy a player that can't play most of that...
How old would she be now...?
Adge_nz
All good stuff, sarge and Matt and anonymous. Thanks for that.
Yes, I'm very slowly coming around to the home theatre way of thinking, too, especially after having to do some research into Panasonic's new PT-AX100E home projector, which looks amazing. So good, in fact, that some professional cinema projectionists in NZ are buying them at $3499 a pop to replace pro 35mm projectors costing over $13 grand!
I guess it's the sheer crapness of IT I'm griping about again. I don't expect everything to be plug and play, by any means, but in the 21st Century it would be nice to be told that a) something isn't working, even though it might look as though it's about to and b) WHY stuff doesn't work: As sarge rightly points out, it was the XVid codec I was missing. It can't be too hard to let the software tell you this - can it? Life is too short to be a geek.
+1 for VLC media player
I have a Mac Mini sitting on top of my TV, playing all my multimedia stuff using VLC. Its got a mouse plugged in for selecting what you want to play
Its great for a techy-guy, but a bit too fidly for joe-public. And while its fine for watching vids, the TV screen is way too fuzzy for using as a computer. You have to guess at some of what you're reading, even on the biggest text size.
Hard drive space is an issue. I burn stuff to DVD just for storage.
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