I have just bought Apple TV 40 GB (previously known as the “iTV”) as a replacement for Apple Express, and spent most of the weekend to rip my CD collection (320 Kbps) and synced it over to the Apple TV, and then packed down all the CDs in plastic boxes and put the CD player in the bottom of a locker. They are not to go back up on the shelf!

Introduction

So why did I buy the Apple TV? I have never gotten along too well with Windows Media Player, and have been using iTunes since v1.0. Even though I am using Windows Vista, my main computer is a MacBook Pro 15″ running MacOS X 10.4. I am not satisfied with my XBOX 360. It works well with my Mac through Connect360, but it simply to noisy. Compared to a other media streamers and the XBOX 360, this thing is small and quiet. So quiet, in fact, I had problems hearing it when not standing directly next to it.

Friends of me would still be surprised, cause I have never owned an iPod and therefor not been part of the iTunes ecosystem. The fact is that I have never been a fan of Walkmans and MP3-players. I am scared that we are about to see a generation of people with permanent hearing damage caused by the small media gadgets. This is not Apple and the iPod’s fault, but simply a problem that comes with earbud headphones.

Like the iPod before it, Apple TV isn’t the first gadget in its category. Several other companies have made set-top boxes or even TV sets and game consoles that could link the TV to the digital content that people have on their computers. But none has found a mass audience for this functionality, mainly because they tend to be hard to set up and confusing to use.  That is why Apple and Steve Jobs call ATV a hobby project. Don’t belive them, as this is what they do best, making beautiful design and simple user interfaces. ATV is like most of Apple products, a product that doesn’t try to do everything and become a mess of complexity. Look back and you will see that iPod started in the same way. Or look back to when Steve Job unveiled the Front Row remote control, and compared it on a Keynote slide to a huge, complex remote with more than 40 buttons.

Hardware Setup

I connected the Apple TV to my Denon AVR-1602 receiver with a pair of Monster cables and with a HDMI cable to my Samsung LE32S86 (ATV does not come with media cables). The speakers I am using are a pair of Cyrus 780. I connected the Apple TV to my Mac laptop, both with an ethernet cable and wirelessly using the 802.11N. My WIFI router is the D-Link Extreme N Wireless Gigabit Router, draft-802.11n.

The furniture that I have chosen for my homecinema equipment, is quite so stylish. The Omega TV/media bench 78705 got bought today, but will sadly first be delivered in 5 weeks time.

Setting Up The Apple TV

The Apple TV is a rounded square with sides that measure just under 19,7 cm apiece. At 1,09 kg, it’s a little heavier than it looks upon first blush (no doubt due to the hard drive and power supply inside, among other things). Comparatively, the Mac mini is only about 16,51 cm on each side, weighs almost the same (1,31 kg), and is about twice as thick as the ATV. It is also far smaller than a typical DVD player, cable or satellite box.

ATV puts your iTunes library – music, podcasts, videos and TV shows on your TV. The Apple TV is delivered with the same remote control as most of the macs. You can sync the Apple TV in the same way as you do with your iPod, but not over Firewire or USB, but rather Ethernet and WIFI.

Unpacking the Apple TV and connecting the cables were done in a minute. The ATV is automatically powered on by plugging it in. There is no power button on the device, so it’s obviously meant to be left on. Power-saving enthusiasts are left with the option to put ATV into standby mode by pressing and holding the play/pause button on the remote control for about six seconds. When you start it, a black-chrome Apple is displayed on the TV screen, followed by the Apple TV introduction video that debuted at Macworld. The video plays every time you start Apple TV, but it can be bypassed by clicking the remote’s Menu button.

After having booted the device, the configuration process can start. No manuals are needed for people with a little bit of comment sense, especially if you plan to use the ATV with Ethernet and DHCP. On my 32-inch HD Ready TV, the Apple TV was capable of automatically selecting 720p as default resolution. I could then start iTunes on my Mac. The ATV appeared in the devices list. When selecting the device, I was asked to write in a 5-number passcode that appeared on the TV.

A few more words about setting up the network connection on the ATV. An Ethernet connection is by default set up as DHCP, but it can also be configured manually. The wireless setup is semi-intelligent, and it is easy to connect to networks with either WEP or WPA. Long WPA keys can be a pain with Apple’s delivered remote control. Considering the lack of buttons on the remote, though, it is still pretty easy to enter strings.

Syncing the Apple TV

It was wasy to configure what media you want to sync (you can also manually select what to sync). For instance you can sync unwatched podcasts and new purchases on iTMS, and this will make the Apple TV automatically updated as your iTunes library changes. If you are unsure on what to choose, then you might just accept Apple’s default suggestion as a start: The 5 most recent movies, all unwatched TV shows (not a problem for us Europeans, all iTunes music, all unplayed podcasts and no photos. If you have a rather large music collection, I suggest that you organize the music in playlists/genre/bitrate and that you only choose 5-6 of your favourite playlists/genre/bitrate to sync. A good tips is to include Top 25 Most Played, My Top Rated and Recently Added. Sadly ATV can’t distinguish between smart playlists and normal playlists.

Be aware that you can only set up the Apple TV to sync with one computer.

Streaming Content From Other Computers

If you want to listen to music or watch video from another computer, you have the possibility to stream the content live to your TV via Apple TV. Five additional computers can be added to the Sources menu in ATV.

Supported File Formats

An unmodified Apple TV has a limited support for file formats, so you can only sync files playable with QuickTime 7. There is no support for WMA and WMV, Ogg Vorbis and Flac, and Flash. I’ve added Flash as a media format, cause Apple TV can connect to YouTube. But when viewing YouTube movies on ATV, they are not shown in Flash as when you watch them on your PC. They have been recoded to H.264.

User Interface

If you have a modern Mac, you will find that the user interface is more or less the same as for Front Row and quite so similar to the one found on iPods. The interface is where the Apple TV outshines XBOX 360 and other digital media adapters! Part of the user interface is also the screen saver module. It provides some really nice eye candy: Floating Apple logo, albums and photos. The images go up the screen at different speeds and sizes, and every once in a while they all twirl around.

The obvious con with the user interface is that you cannot buy content from iTMS directly with ATV, as you can with XBOX360 and Live.

Music

I am writing this blog update just days after Apple announced that they have sold 3 billion songs on iTunes Music Store. I have not been the biggest fan of this online store, as most of the music are sold with DRM and a to low bitrate for home stereo/cinema systems. But having said that, Apple has been the most successful in telling consumers that music (and video) don’t have to be delivered on media (such as CDs and DVDs). I still prefer buying my music on CDs, for the following reasons: Content can be ripped over and over again, and just as important, I am not locked to the file formats WMA or AAC. Having said that, all music currently on the ATV is ripped in MP3 320 Kbps.

MP3 was chosen so that I can use the same music files on my Sansa e260, and the high bitrate to get the needed quality when playing the music on my homecinema.

I found that the audio quality was excellent even though that I am primarily using the ATV with with a lossy codec, and wasn’t cannot say that the audio quality became notedly better with Apple Lossless.  But a true audiophile would probably find something to complain about!

Podcasts

I haven’t found to many podcasts that interest me, and there are only two that I watch regularly: GeekBrief.TV and Rocketboom. For Mac fans I can also recommend  ScreenCastsOnline (Mac Video Tutorials). Others are TreeHuggerTV and Comedy Central: Stand-Up (Video). My favorite audio podcasts are David Pogue, Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrot, and Whack My Bush.

Pictures

The file format support for photos is great: JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, and TIFF are all supported. Engadget found out that ATV even supports viewing RAW photos.

Videos

With Apple TV American users can buy media content from iTMS. Not much video content has been been made available yet, but more is probably to come. You can also watch theatrical trailer from Apple.com, but that is just fun for five minutes! Something that doesn’t interest me at all is the possibility to watch YouTube videos, but that is possible too …

The two supported file formats for ATV are H.264 (max resolution: 1280 x 720) and MPEG-4 (max resolution: 3Mbps and 720 x 432).  Content in Divx, XviD and WMV, must first be converted to one of the above mentioned formats. Now the really sad part: Engadget ran into a 4GB file limit and 5Mbps bitrate limit for the media it does support. That means that not even Apple’s own 720p HD trailers (8Mbps) can be played on these devices! But how good is a 5 Mbps bitrate of H.264? It is actually really good. I this spring wrote about Norway getting DVB-T with H.264. The official opening of this new net is now less then a month away, and here is a quote of what I wrote about the quality when testing it for the first time:

Yes, Norway was to get better DVB-T then Germany. Well, a better technical solution. Norway already had better DVB-T when NTV did test broadcasts with MPEG-2. NRK often got broadcasted with 9 Mbps while German channels typically got broadcasted 2,5-3 Mbps. This basically ment that the pictures from NRK were of a much higher quality, the German channels looked like a movie from a well-used VHS cassette. The reason for this is simply the available bandwidth, and that German suppliers chose to push more channels to consumers. If Norway had gone for MPEG-2 we would probably had done the same mistake. In short, Norway chose to implement a digital terrestrical HD (High Definition) TV and Germany a SD (Standard Definition) TV, something that will make a significant difference now that more and more people get their HD-Ready flat-panel TVs! The test broadcasts are still only SDTV, but NTV/RiksTV will hopefully move fast on to providing a few channels in HDTV (720p/1080i).

It is quite fun and interesting to see how much the data transfer has gone down, without the picture quality becoming worse! When NTV was broadcasting in MPEG-2, the data transfer was changing constantly, but often up to 9 Mbps. The “new” test broadcast of NRK in MPEG-4 only has a data transfer of 3,1 Mbps.

I wasn’t complaining when watching NRK on a MPEG-2 with a 9 Mbps stream, and believe me when I tell you that I couldn’t see a difference in quality with 3,1 Mbps stream in H.264! It is a far better codec, and think about it, you have about another 2 Mbps before reaching the stream limit that Engadget found. But as the XBOX doesn’t have the same limit, it is safe to conclude that it is far better on HD content, with it’s supported codecs MPEG-2 HD and VC-1. I have till now purchased 5 HD DVDs that I watch with my XBOX, and I will buy more.

A small user tips: QuickTime Pro ($29 from Apple) excists for both MacOS and Windows, and can (with Perian) open a number of different formats and then encode them “for Apple TV“.

Some Finale Words

ATV comes in two versions, with 40GB or 160 GB hard drive, and with a big price gap between them. There is no files that eat your hard drive up faster then media files, and the better quality, the more space the files take! Don’t get blinded of Apple’s spec page, as the support team must have been dreaming when writing them! The 40 GB version actually only offers under 33GB of space, with 3.000 songs in 320 Kbps, some hundred pictures and subscriptions to two-three HD podcasts, and the device is full.

A wake up call: Apple TV is a computer without antivirus software. It comes with a modified version of MacOS X, and needs to be maintained. Don’t let it become the weak hackable point in your home network!