Monday, April 30, 2007

Apple TV - Not impressed

I've been using the Apple troika (iMac, iPod and Apple TV) for a few weeks now and I have to say I am not really impressed by the new toy: Apple TV. I am not bothered by the low quality or a small hard disk. The former is the result of limited bitrate and the latter will probably increase with the next version.

What really doesn't work for me is the extension of personal music management (iTunes/iPod) to the home entertainment. What I am missing is some form of video/music back-end. Here is why:

At this moment I can either stream videos to Apple TV from multiple computers or sync it with one of our iTunes libraries. But streaming requires to log-in into a computer and run iTunes. It is not really convenient since nobody else can be using that computer. And syncing is not good either. I have a large NAS in our basement and I don't want to keep copy of the music and video library in the living room.

In the ideal world I would be able to point Apple TV to my NAS and access the files directly. Or there would be a server side component (something like SlimServer) that would stream files to the Apple TV. Unfortunately SlimServer was acquired by Logitech recently. That's too bad since Apple buing SlimDevices would get very close to an ideal world for me...

1 comment:

David Hajek said...

Ideal world with mythtv:

http://www.mythtvtalk.com/forum/archive/o_t/t_1170/mythtv_and_quotfrontend_and_quot_vs_and_quotbackend_and_quot.html