My Apple TV arrived on Friday. My net (lengthy writeup below): it does exactly what it says it will do, with the typical Apple ease-of-use and smooth setup. But there are a lot of limits to what it does, such that I may well buy a Mac mini this week and return the Apple TV.
As a testament to how easy the Apple TV was to set up, I arrived home at 10pm on Friday after 5 hours of happy hour and was able to get it working within about ten minutes. Admittedly I’m a lot better at tech stuff than the average Joe, but many devices still make me curse out loud. Not so this Apple TV.
After the initial setup process, I played around with the music options and then scanned through a few movies. I set it to sync with my Power Mac tower in my bedroom; syncing of movies over the wired Ethernet network was quite fast, even w/o Gigabit support in the Apple TV. Movie playback was very responsive and of high quality on the device, with no skipping, audio problems, etc. (Of course, the quality of video playback on the device depends a lot on the encoding process used to make video compatible with the Apple TV’s supported file types and file specs.) The device works as advertised and should satisfy all users who buy it with eyes wide open as to its limitations.
And the limitations? For the average user, it is that (for video) you need to buy all your content from the iTunes store to have an easy means of getting the right kind of video into iTunes. Otherwise, you have to rip a DVD (illegal under the DMCA), which would take about a half hour, and then re-encode it in an app like VisualHub, which has settings specifically for the Apple TV. One might expect two to three hours for that re-encoding, depending on quality settings. So there’s no way in hell my parents would follow this route. Photos and music are easier to add, since people already have them in the relevant format on their computer, whether PC or Mac.
For the power user, like myself, there are other limitations that matter:
1) The device can only display photos that are synced (as opposed to streamed), so all your photos would have to be on the main, synced computer. I currently keep my iPhoto library on my MacBook, not my Power Mac, so until I transfer them over to my Power Mac, I can’t see them on the Apple TV. (And I would have to decided that I want to make the Power Mac my main photo computer.) And if a friend came over with some photos to share, said friend couldn’t share the photos unless you made his computer the synced computer, or transferred them onto your synced computer’s hard drive.
2) The Apple TV has only a 40 GB hard drive, with about 33 GB that are usable out of the box (thank the embedded version of OS X and the usual hard drive size rounding for the missing 7 GB). If you have it sync a few movies (2 to 3 GB each in size) and some iTunes playlists, there isn’t likely to be any room for photos. Which brings up…
3) Content is synced by content type in a specified order that the user can’t change. Movies then TV shows then music (or is it podcasts next?) then photos. Presumably this is done so that users can let the Apple TV/iTunes combo manage what content actually gets on the device, but I would like to be able to have it reflect my own priorities. The effect is that I would have to manually manage what content is added anyway to deal with this fixed priority list.
4) Content selections are managed from iTunes on each respective computer, whether that computer is synced with the Apple TV or streams to it. If you want to change what shows up on the Apple TV, you have to go to your computer to change it–there’s no ability to change that on the Apple TV. Say you want to watch a movie that you have in iTunes, but you don’t have it on your Apple TV (the two selection criteria are (i) checkboxes for specific movies or (ii) “xx most recently added/xx unviewed movies; both criteria can be active at once)–you have to get up and change the criteria on your computer. The 40 GB hard drive mitigates this issue, but part of the appeal to me in getting all your movies onto a computer hard drive is that you can easily browse and view without flipping through a binder of DVDs. One might as well just get up and pop in a DVD into your DVD player as go to the computer to tweak the settings.
5) The device does not support multi-channel audio. This is a big deal for watching movies, as anyone who has seen a DVD on a good surround setup can attest. In another shortcoming versus a DVD, you don’t get any extra features, director commentary, etc., whether one buys a movie from the iTunes store or rips and re-encodes a DVD.
6) There is no ability to sync certain types of content from a computer and stream other kinds from that same computer. A computer is either a syncer or a streamer. Given that I have 100 GB of music in iTunes, I clearly can’t sync it all. I’d love to be able to have access to all of it from the Apple TV. Actually, that’s a must in my book. I don’t want to have to (as stated above) manage my Apple TV constantly in iTunes to make sure that I don’t overfill it. It defeats the whole point of having a device in the living room. Note that my Xbox 360 can access the entire iTunes library, via streaming, using the (super buggy and shitty and resource-hogging but ultimately functional) Connect360 program that tricks the 360 into thinking that a Mac is a Windows XP Home Theater PC and thus compatible with the 360’s media features.
Mac Mini
As I mentioned at the outset, I’m thinking about returning the Apple TV for a Mac mini that would also connect to my TV. How would the Mac mini handle these issues?
1) iPhoto on the Mini (I’m tired of hewing to Apple’s convention of lowercasing the initial letter, sorry) can stream all photos in another Mac’s iPhoto library that is on the network. Or, I could store all of my photos (or a copy of them) on my (currently non-functional) network attached storage (NAS) drive and just view them on the Mini. (Let’s assume now that the NAS drive does work, since I plan to fix it.)
2) The Mini comes with a 60 GB hard drive, upgradeable to at least 200 GB, and has ports for adding external drives. But you don’t even need to do so, since the Mini can access anything stored on the NAS drive with complete flexibility, unlike the Apple TV.
3) & 6) Again, the limitations of Apple TV’s fixed priorities and syncing/streaming requirements go away with the Mini, since it is just a Mac with the same power and flexibility as any other Mac. Note also that the iTunes streaming works in the same fashion as the iPhoto photo streaming.
4) So long as the content is stored on the NAS drive or is streamed from a computer that is awake, you don’t have to leave the living room to configure anything. Score another point for the Mac mini.
5) Multi-channel audio supported in the Mini. And you can view both DVDs and ripped DVDs, so all the features found on DVDs are there.
Mini bummers
Apart from the 2x cost of the Mac mini versus the Apple TV, why would anyone choose an Apple TV? I can list several:
-Personally, my biggest issue is whether I can get the Mini to connect successfully to my TV. I have a 3 year old Sony rear-projection LCD HDTV that comes with a DVI connector. However, the manual states that the DVI connection is not intended for use with personal computers. If I had an LCD HDTV or a TV with a VGA PC input, or a TV with a DVI or HDMI input expressly intended and configured for use with a computer, this would be easy. But connecting via the DVI input requires a display resolution not part of the Mini’s standard list as well as tweaking to reduce something called overscan, which is common on projection TVs. Luckily, my web browsing has revealed that a program called DisplayConfigX will most likely let me overcome this issue.
-While the Mac mini comes with Front Row, Apple’s app for couch control that is about as good as the Apple TV interface, as well as the same remote as the Apple TV, what do you do when you need to change other settings on the device? Ideally you configure everything once and I don’t need to touch it, but for those times when you need to work the mouse and keyboard, I guess you could get wireless devices or just sit close to the TV and hope the problem is easily resolved. Not ideal, but I don’t anticipate needing to frequently change settings. I just want to use the Mini as a playback conduit.
The rub of the Apple TV is that it is so simple to set up and use, but to get video content, there’s no user-friendly method but for the iTunes store. It’s a device that’s a bit ahead of the state of content distribution and usage patterns. But ultimately I think it’s too limited for me. If I get the Mini, I’ll report back in. Hopefully I won’t have blown out the HDTV in the process of setting the Mini up. There’s a very small risk of that, but I think still possible if I try to send an unsupported display signal to it—that’s what has held me back previously from going the Mac mini route.
P.S. One aside: a lot of reviewers have noted that the Apple TV doesn’t allow for direct purchasing of music or movies from the iTunes store. Doesn’t make much sense, right? Presumably that feature will be enabled rapidamente via a software upgrade to the Apple TV (which is basically a low-power Mac). Since I don’t plan to buy any movies from the iTunes store and only buy music from Amazon (CDs) or eMusic (no DRM, higher quality), it’s a non-issue for me.
