Saturday, February 16, 2008

AppleTV, Take Two

Today Ivette picked up two 40GB AppleTVs, one for my home office, the second one for PJs room. Setup was not like a typical Apple product, in fact, it was a pain in the ass.


1. I was completely aware that the AppleTV would arrive with the old version of the software, and I still forgot to upgrade it, then wasted too much time trying to get it connected to iTunes.


2. I did not notice that the two MAC addresses (ethernet and airport) were in the box, so I had to waste yet more time getting the MAC addresses into my router's allowed list.


3. My 37" Olevia is officially a piece of shit. It gave me a lot of grief while trying to use HDMI, while PJ's 32" Olevia (which can't use HDMI to connect to an Xbox 360) has had zero issues.


4. There are two ways to connect to iTunes, the interface does not do such a good job explaining the differences.


5. The upgrade to Take Two took forever, it was just ridiculous.


Notice that many of these problems are my fault, or not directly related to the device itself. Once setup it has been pure joy.


Even without using h.264, the videos that I have transcoded look fantastic. The interface is also much nicer than what I am used to with the Xbox 360 (connected through Connect360).


I haven't rented movies yet, but I did buy two season passes for PJ (Calliou and Teletubbies). I have no idea how to backup media purchased from an AppleTV, so I bought these from Ivette's iMac. That way I know I can copy these downloads offline just in case.



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