Last week I was asked to install Apple TV into a home cinema system. I’d never used one of these boxes before, and thought it was just another Apple gimmick – how wrong was I?
The technical specs for the box are impressive – built-in 802.11g/n wifi, HDMI and composite AV interconnects, and left and right audio channels. Interestingly there are no cables provided to connect to your AV source, and I think this is a good decision as you’re not going to be paying for cables you never use.
For this installation I had to connect it to an Arcam AV350 amplifier, which was acting as an AV aggregator and sending to a Pioneer plasma TV. While all three devices (TV, AV amp and Apple TV) have HDMI capabilities, this was not being used due to existing cable runs. That said, even on composite video and standard audio, th
e picture and sound were astonishing.
e picture and sound were astonishing.On power up Apple TV looked for available wireless networks and asked for the key. Inputting was a little fiddly, but considering all you have is the Apple mini remote, it’s not bad for a one-time experience. After connecting to the wireless network, it then downloaded and applied an update. This took a while, even on a 24Mb BeBox connection, and then the box rebooted.
Once up again, it provided a code for iTunes. I turned on my laptop, fired up iTunes and could see the Apple TV listed in the devices section. iTunes asked for the code and I punched it in. It went through a few more options and then started synching my iTunes library onto the unbuilt 40Gb disk.
Now I have a lot more media than 40Gb and I was wondering how it would deal with that. Apple have come up with common sense here – it will synchronise movies and videos first, then music, podcasts and photos. This makes sure that video content will take priority.
It also has this other great feature of letting upto 5 other iTunes libraries connect to it wirelessly, allowing these other computers to stream content wirelessly to the TV.
With Steve Jobs announcing Apple TV take 2 at the recent MacWorld event in San Francisco, it’s clear that Apple want movie rentals to become as big a revenue stream as music sales are. And it makes sense too. I have about 200 DVD’s and most of those I’ve only watched once or twice. They’re taking up space on my bookshelves and generally just a reminder of how much money I’ve wasted.
All in all, this is a great solution for getting iTunes media onto your TV, and with the forthcoming update to allow video rentals I can see this flying out of the Apple stores.
Posted by Noel 