Apple TV Review
A few months ago I bought an Apple TV. I thought between the size of the actual device and the ability to plug in to my already extensive iTunes music library that it would be a great purchase. I’ve been meaning to write this review for awhile, but in that time I actually sold the Apple TV on EBay. I’m very happy I did so and I even recouped most of the purchase price. It basically came down to one thing; the Apple TV is not powerful enough.
The Apple TV is an interesting device. Apple has even said themselves that it is a hobby for them. The box holds so much potential but it just lacks in too many ways. At least for me. Before I go and bash the device I’m going to let you know that there are some positives.
- It’s a wonderfully designed piece of hardware. It’s small and nice to look at.
- If you live in the iTunes world it’s also a great piece of hardware. It connects beautifully with iTunes and if you purchase all of your music and video from Apple, the device makes it easy to put it on your TV.
- It makes a great remote speaker for playing music from your computer via a wireless network.
- It can be hacked
The fact that the Apple TV can be hacked made me hold on to the device a little longer than I expected. I was able to install XBMC and Boxee and open the device up to my own video collection and to some great internet video via Boxee. The problem was with my own video collection. I’m starting to collect higher quality video and the Apple TV just cannot handle it. Now, I could re-encode my video collection so that it still looks good and the Apple TV can handle it but it is a huge pain in the ass (I actually started to do this and realized there had to be a better way). Also, the device wasn’t capable of handling some Internet video and the playback would be very choppy. Even moving around the menus was a laggy experience. So, I had enough and I sold it.
I know am the proud of owner of a custom built home theater PC. It has a quad-core processor with 4gb of RAM and a very nice onboard video and audio card. I even threw in a Blu Ray drive. It has HDMI out for easy connection to my TV (just as the Apple TV did). I could have put it in a small case but I chose a case that looks like a big audio receiver. It currently has 2.3 TB of storage and I plan on adding another 1.5TB very soon. This machine can play back any file type I throw at it with ease and is very quiet. I plan on making another write-up about the machine with pictures and a list of the products I chose to install in it. I’ll also talk about the software I’m using to power the system.
Anybody else have an Apple TV experience?
