More on AppleTV Take Two

After a weekend of basically beating the living crap out of our two AppleTVs (40GB), it is obvious to us that this thing is definitely the wave of the future. It is literally a cable box on crack.

It took me less than a day to get PJ convinced to stop watching videos in his Xbox 360 (streamed from a Mac running Connect360) and instead use the AppleTV. His AppleTV was running, almost nonstop, every minute he was awake over the weekend. And today, school holiday, the same deal. He woke up and immediately turned it on.

His only problem is that sometimes he gets lost in the menus, not because he can't read them, but because hitting the menu button multiple times doesn't keep moving you up the menu hierarchy, which is not very intuitive. Instead it alternates between two actions.

I am having a ball with my own, so far my only real frustration is that I can't use my second HDMI port in my 37" Olevia. It's not the end of the world, at 1080i and with nice component cables it looks almost identical to HDMI.

What probably became more of a challenge was to learn certain workarounds in iTunes. For example, you can't do a multiple edit for video files if you want to edit the video dependent tags, instead you must edit them one by one. I found some utilities to work around this, but I hated them all.

I think so far the most puzzling issue was that I was not seeing new artwork as I was assigning it to movie files. I found a post in the Apple support forums where it explained how to force it to see the new art. All you have to do is delete the file from the library, but leaving the file itself in the same place. When you add it again, it only takes a few seconds, and it will force the AppleTV to load the new art.

Another issue that had bugged me forever: space. This Mac Book Pro has a 200GB drive. After taking into account Parallels Desktop, iTunes and iPhoto, I was left with maybe 20GB or so to play with. I had forgotten that nothing forces you to run your iTunes library in the default location in your home folder. In fact, it can run from anywhere. Ivette bought me a 500GB external drive so we could back up whatever shows we bought for PJ, since we did not want to risk the iMac dying for good and having to pay for these shows twice. I decided to tell iTunes to switch my library home to a folder in the 500GB drive, and the damn thing just worked. First it spent a few minutes rewriting the library file, then it copied everything to its new location. The process did not take long, and now I have basically unlimited storage for my iTunes.