New Apple TV - what's the verdict?

ZV Yoda

Have mine on order, but not yet received. A colleague has received his & not impressed at all (he thinks the previous version is better). Says it's way too slow.

Any comments from anybody who's received theirs already?

lalee17

Have mine on order too, still haven't received it. I'd imagine the speed of the ATV is largely due to your colleague's download speeds!

KeithM89_old

Mine hasnt arrived - supposed to come on Friday buy a friend got one and loves it - he does have blazingly fast broadband though - at least 20 megs

talla

Mine arrived today. UI is almost exactly the same as old apple TV. Performance wise it seems the same. Rented a movie earlier and it was ready to watch after 5 seconds although I am on a fast enough UPC connection.
Big difference is how easy it is set up to stream from computers on home network. I already had Itunes sharing enabled, it prompted me on the apple TV did I want to use Home sharing or something along those lines and connected to both my Itunes libraries on my imac and laptop automatically.
Biggest thing I'm looking forward to is using airplay on the Ipad in iOS4.2.
US Itunes account and airplay should be a great combination.

Lads I want to pick one of these up in the states, would any of you be able to fill me in on how to get it to stream US info? Do I need a US voucher etc? How do you rent movies on it?

paulhardman

Grab a $$ iTunes voucher when you're in the US, and google for it... you'll need a second email address for your new iTunes account.

Lockster

Mine arrived yesterday, so set it up last night and so far so good. I have a US iTunes account and once the location was changed in the settings I could log into it no problem. I am also amazed by how well the streaming performs from the iTunes library on my PC. I was sure that I was going to have to invest in a new router but seems OK so far. Tried renting a HD movie and it took about 10 to 15 mins to get to a stage where it was ready to watch on a 3 meg broadband conection, although I have not watched it yet, so will report back on the quality after that.

So as I say so far so good.

lalee17

Is it possible to set up your Netflix account with the ATV in Ireland?

banquo

American credit card required. Anyone know how to buy a year's Netflix subscription over here?

elvis jones

I take it ATV still doesn't play avi out of the box ?

lalee17

Nope. Jailbreaking will supposedly bypass that problem though!

elvis jones

meh if it can't be done out of the box i can't be arsed.

jeromeof

If they open up to third party developers then I imagine the VLC guys or some of the other App developers will quickly develop support for AVI's.

Though without much storage and without a USB interface direct playing of AVI's is probably going to be impractical. But hopefully say the AirVideo guys would make an AppleTV client which would be fantastic.

The other way is to have IOS 4.2 on an iPod/iPhone/iPad and use the AirPlay feature when it becomes available.

Personally I am waiting until they announce some developer support for the AppleTV before getting one. Seems completely limited in Ireland at the moment.

crazyderk

Could you not import AVI's into ITunes and stream from there?

elvis jones

crazyderk wrote: »

Could you not import AVI's into ITunes and stream from there?

No it would have to be played via quicktime i believe and i think ATV only supports mp4. I got rid of mine 2 years ago because it didn't play avi and i have to convert everything.

Now i just have a NAS drive connected to my PS3 and i just play direct from there with no messing or wires.

banquo

Though I love the apple tv - preorder coming through soon! - I think Boxee's apps are the way forward. Though Apple have the muscle to get content.

ZV Yoda

Got mine yesterday & set it up last night. The unit itself is very small & looks great. Setup-wise it wasn’t too bad… once I hooked it up to my (Irish) iTunes account, it was ready to rent movies in seconds. I was very pleasantly surprised with the picture quality… I don’t have blu-ray or HD cable, so the picture quality was a big step up vs. standard def.

It took a while to synch the iPad & iPod as controllers (using the remote app) but once they did, they were much better than using the supplied remote (which is funky enough to look at - but since it’s made of brushed aluminium, it’s not all that nice to use).

One thing that really bugged me was that there’s no way to adjust the volume (even if using the remote app). That’s a big miss…. It means you still need to use your TV / surround sound remote to control the volume.

It took ages to sync with our home PC though… once it did, it streamed photos pretty quickly. I was surprised that the photo quality wasn’t better… but I assume that’s because iTunes has compressed them?

Overall, this is really nifty technology, but it’s obviously only tipping the iceberg of what it’s capable of… I know there are all sorts of politics / deals going on in the background with content providers & ISPs… not to mention Apple’s own control freak mentality on content control… but really, it would be fantastic if ATV allowed full web browsing & gaming on the big screen… using an iPad/Pod/Phone as the control device… and don’t get me started on flash…

Be interesting to see what happens when the Nov iOS release enables Air Play from the iOS devices to the ATV

ashleey

I got mine yesterday too and found the link up with my mac over my network excellent. However, I tried to rent a film directly for the kids and it got stuck on 'loading' suggesting that it would be ready in 164 mins! For a streamed film, that's ridiculous. Could vodafone ISP be throttling the connection to iTunes servers? It seems I might have to rent on my mac and then stream to the tv and so not in hd. Ridiculous. I'm waiting for a response from iTunes help at the moment.

wayne040576

I'll point to my post in the other thread:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=68461192&postcount=9

ashleey

I just tried to watch an hd trailer of an 'In Theaters' film and it just sat in loading. It seems that the system builds a buffer of at least 3 mins although probably longer. For HD this is too much for a standard Irish 3mb line. I switched off HD in options and tried the same trailer in SD. It started within 30 secs. Broadband anyone?

aidan_walsh

HD streaming is always going to be too much for a "3"MB line.

Is 8mb all good for HD streaming?

ashleey

I would check your real download speed first as my 3 mb line gives a max 2.5mb. Contention when everyone is watching at the same time could be a problem. Unless of course you have 'next generation' broadband

lol yeah i've got the next generation bband, no contention and 7.80mb 80% of the time as real download speed.

2.5mb out of 3mb is really good by the way...

ZV Yoda

I checked our BB speed & we have 13.55Mbs download / 1.25Mbps upload... but even at that speed, I'm still seeing a small amount of buffering on trailers (haven't had time to watch a full movie yet). Not enough to cause any concern - and still a hell of a lot faster than waiting for a DVD to load up!

ashleey

I'm not critical of my provider, it's just a shame that to get an HD rental then I would have to move to a bigger town, but then I would be living nearer the DVD shop for Blu rays too!

alexlyons

Those of you that want AVI's on it, if your on a mac (which I believe you have to be, I've never had one and haven't been tempted until now) just use iSquint. Very quick and easy converter to mpg. Does a 750mb movie on a 2.8Ghz iMac in about 10-15 minutes

aidan_walsh

which I believe you have to be

You believe incorrectly. You just need a supported version of iTunes on either platform.

ZV Yoda

I watched a HD movie from iTunes last night.... it took less than 10 secs to buffer at the start & after that, it was just like watching TV. Only 2 things I noticed:
1. About half way through, the picture froze for about 4 or 5 secs, although it righted itself straight away.
2. There is a weird, but noticeable effect from time to time... you know those camera shots than pan slowly across a scene / landscape?... well there is an effect that’s a lot like “stop/go” animation... the panning effect is slight jumpy.

Aside from those minor quibbles, it was great. Sound quality was excellent. I still can’t understand why it’s not possible to control the volume remotely – that a real PITA.

ashleey

What speed connection do you have? I rented an SD movie for the kids yesterday and it worked fine apart from a slight strange look as though it is made as a CGI film, if you know what I mean. I might retry HD in a few days. Googling the issue of long download times for HD suggests is it not an isolated problem and may be an iTunes server issue (that may improve as demand flattens out?).

ZV Yoda

ashleey wrote: »

What speed connection do you have? I rented an SD movie for the kids yesterday and it worked fine apart from a slight strange look as though it is made as a CGI film, if you know what I mean. I might retry HD in a few days. Googling the issue of long download times for HD suggests is it not an isolated problem and may be an iTunes server issue (that may improve as demand flattens out?).

We have 15Mb UPC BB... when I tested it yesterday, it regestered 13.55Mbs download, so it's a pretty good connection.

ashleey

ZV Yoda wrote: »

We have 15Mb UPC BB... when I tested it yesterday, it regestered 13.55Mbs download, so it's a pretty good connection.

Oh...how the other half live...

Meanwhile back in outer mongolia....

ZV Yoda

ashleey wrote: »

Oh...how the other half live...

Meanwhile back in outer mongolia....

We originally only signed up for 10Mb... but a few weeks back we got a text / email from UPC saying we were getting a free upgrade to 15Mb. No idea why we got it, but I'm not complaining!

thecivvie

I rented the HD version of Beneath Hill 60, no steaming problems, played from beginning to end with out a glitch. Have to say, I am glad I got it. Downloaded some trailers from the US store, I did this on my PC and even though I played it on the Apple TV, iTunes is still showing 25 days left on it, though it should have gone to 48 hours once I played it

lalee17

Anyone jailbreak their ATV yet? I think I have... I put the custom firmware on it but nothing is different about it..

akadesign

Just got one of these and as a previous owner of the older model I has a couple of queries.

1) Is it possible to have the option of renting high def and standard def together, I know you can change it in preferences but looking for the option without having to do that.

2) What's up with the volume? No control.

Other than that really impressed, with a US account there's really a great selection and speedy.

wayne040576

akadesign wrote: »

Just got one of these and as a previous owner of the older model I has a couple of queries.

1) Is it possible to have the option of renting high def and standard def together, I know you can change it in preferences but looking for the option without having to do that.

2) What's up with the volume? No control.

Other than that really impressed, with a US account there's really a great selection and speedy.

I don't think you can rent the hd and sd together like the old model, but I'll check. Were you not a bit disappointed by the selection of tv shows coming from the old ATV? I know I was. Hopefully they'll add more, but I'm fairly sure that there were some shows that have already disappeared from the 99c rental list.
I wanted to rent a show last night that I noticed a few weeks back when I first got it, but it was no longer available.

akadesign

Thought so, might be trying to push one or the other but some movies really don't require the full hd experience.

Don't really use the tv show part a lot but will check it out. I suppose some networks are reluctant to roll over to the 99 cent model, but when they see these things selling like crazy im sure that will change their mind. Happened in the early days of iTunes music.

hades

Hi Guys

I'm thinking about getting one of these babies, how much is it to rent the HD movies? on iTunes it says around €3.99, and then says underneath HD available on iPad and ATV... just want to make sure its worth buying, if rentals are cheap enough.

aidan_walsh

hades wrote: »

Hi Guys

I'm thinking about getting one of these babies, how much is it to rent the HD movies? on iTunes it says around €3.99, and then says underneath HD available on iPad and ATV... just want to make sure its worth buying, if rentals are cheap enough.

The HD version is usually about €1 more.

Hugh Cream

have one of these and generally happy with it but i cant for the life of me get it to connect to my itunes on my pc,no problem connecting to the mac but to the pc,nothing.
googled it and it seems to be a big problem.

Lordhumphreys

Thinking of getting these for my bro as a birthday pressie in a few weeks. Do you need to buy anything extra, like HDMI leads, etc??

Tonio

Lordhumphreys wrote: »

Thinking of getting these for my bro as a birthday pressie in a few weeks. Do you need to buy anything extra, like HDMI leads, etc??

Bought one a few weeks back. Rented a HD movie for €3.99 last week. Impressed with the quality. Playback started after only a few minutes and there were no interruptions. I am on a 7 meg DSL broadband connection. [EDIT: Noticed that the movie playback used approx 5GB of my download allowance - so you would not want to be watching too many in a month!]

You need to buy a HDMI cable (I picked one up for €6.99) and an optical cable for Dolby Digital if you have a surround sound system.

I am in the process of ripping all of my DVDs and Blurays to my PC so I will be able to stream them to Apple tv. Have watched a few of my movies this way already and am impressed with the quality and convenience.

Well worth the €119 in my opinion.

wayne040576

Tonio wrote: »

Bought one a few weeks back. Rented a HD movie for €3.99 last week. Impressed with the quality. Playback started after only a few minutes and there were no interruptions. I am on a 7 meg DSL broadband connection. [EDIT: Noticed that the movie playback used approx 5GB of my download allowance - so you would not want to be watching too many in a month!]

You need to buy a HDMI cable (I picked one up for €6.99) and an optical cable for Dolby Digital if you have a surround sound system.

I am in the process of ripping all of my DVDs and Blurays to my PC so I will be able to stream them to Apple tv. Have watched a few of my movies this way already and am impressed with the quality and convenience.

Well worth the €119 in my opinion.

What are you using to rip the DVDs? I was using handbrake which was working but taking ages. I've only done about 15/20 movies so far.

Tonio

wayne040576 wrote: »

What are you using to rip the DVDs? I was using handbrake which was working but taking ages. I've only done about 15/20 movies so far.

Same here. Takes a while but the quality is very good.

Zhane

Can you stream the movies you buy on itunes on your computer over Appletv?

banquo

Yup!

dSleeper

Is it worth setting up a US netflix account?

adox

dSleeper wrote: »

Is it worth setting up a US netflix account?

You need a US credit card for an account.

dSleeper

adox wrote: »

You need a US credit card for an account.

You dont..I used an Irish one with a US address to get a free month..

adox

dSleeper wrote: »

You dont..I used an Irish one with a US address to get a free month..

Thats good to know. I may try it myself.

I dont understand though, why you are asking is it worth setting up an account if you already have done it?