Apple TV

feelintherage

feelintherage

feelintherage

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28 Mar 2007
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455
I maybe should have asked in the home cinema forum but anyways...

I was looking at it and thinking it would be pretty cool to stream movies to the bedroom etc, i was mainly wondering what peoples impressions of it are?

Also i havent ripped any of my dvds, im not really sure how to do it properly so im still experimenting with settings, im using handbrake but i cant seem to get the videos to come out properly, they are always really low res and blocky :(

cheers
 
I've had one since launch and love mine. Not something that I use every day, but does the job nicely when I need it.

The main driving factor for me was so I could stream my iTunes library to my AV receiver from my Mac and now my iPhone. I've also rented a few HD movies which were excellent quality, just my internet connection letting the experience down in terms of time to wait until the film was 'ready' to watch.

My movie collection is still on physical DVD/BR so don't have any experience of ripping unfortunately. But as long as your content is in iTunes it will play through the TV no problem.
 
feelintherage said:
Also i havent ripped any of my dvds, im not really sure how to do it properly so im still experimenting with settings, im using handbrake but i cant seem to get the videos to come out properly, they are always really low res and blocky :(
Click to expand...

You can improve that probably but they will pretty much always be worse quality than the DVD due to the encoding process. If you don't mind the quality then the ATV will be very inexpensive and convenient but if you want high quality video/audio then they are best avoided really.
 
I got a ATV2 (the latest one).

Out of the box, its a piece of crap really especially if you are not interested in listening to podcasts on your TV or watching expensive on demand movies.

Once you have jail broken it and installed XBMC, its pretty damn excellent at streaming from my NAS. Sure XBMC is not 100% perfect yet but it's just the beginning.
 
I got an ATV2 a few weeks ago for streaming TV from my itunes library. It works perfectly for that, also in the the process of ripping some of my dvds (mostly TV box sets) into my library to stream to the TV as well.

I've just been using handbrake for ripping, as long as I set it to the ATV2 preset the quality is perfect, on the TV, MBP or my iphone.
 
I like using mine (w/my iPhone's Remote app) for YouTube subscriptions, Apple.com trailers e.t.c. I'll use it for video once I have my NAS set up, although that won't be movie rips, just guitar tutorial vids and stuff like that where absolute quality isn't an issue. As someone else said it's 'there when I need it' and for £99 it's just about worth the money.

Now that iOS 4.3 is out, I'm looking forward to seeing apps and websites take advantage of the new AirPlay features, which is where I think it will really start to shine.
 
Im currently ripping my Dvds, man it takes an age and i hope im doing this correctly because it would be rather soul destroying if i had messed up something in the settings haha :(


I've been looking for something to stream my media for a while, i just want it to be simple play my movies and box sets, my birthday is in a bit and i figured id get apple tv for my birthday, so this has spured me on to ripping my dvds.


What has been said before is correct right? that rips will look worse than dvd?

Apart from the handbrake atv2 settings, does anybody else use any custom settings?

Im using Dvdfab to rip dvds and then handbrake for the rest.

any help appreciated, cheers.
 
I've got a 1st gen Apple TV and a 2nd gen model. I have my entire DVD collection ripped using Handbrake. Yes, it took forever to do. :p

I take Handbrake's universal setting and make the following changes:

- Decomb: default
- 2-pass encoding
- Avg bitrate: 1500kbps

Comes out looking pretty good.
 
Downloaded. The keyboard layout has been altered if you're using the remote so it's more efficient, I have major league baseball as one of the internet things (yay...) and it's primed for all these iOS 4.3 AirPlay things from Apps and Safari.

I mainly use Chrome though!
 
Was interested in getting one of these.
So I could rip my DVD's to it? Or is that only if you jail break? Or is that me reading wrong lol? Want it so everyone at home can access and share the iTunes, films etc. Seems like a nice cheap solution.
 
No the ATV2 doesn't have any storage (well it does, but only 8gb for buffering streams etc and you can't use it), it's purely a streamer. I think it's a good piece of kit, use mine for renting films via itunes rather than walking to the video store and steam films/tv series from my pc upstairs.

Airplay is excellent too - if I get halfway through watching something on my iphone while commuting, when I get in I can just push the airplay button and it continues playing on the TV rather than the phone.

I have had issues though - it's reliant upon you having iTunes running on a PC in order to stream content (although you can rent films without having a PC involved) and iTunes is a bit pap as a media server. I found that it would crawl to a halt if you tried to add media from a NAS to your library. Home sharing also seems incapable of handling large amounts of shared photos, so the slideshow aspect is a bit worthless too.

Overall I'd recommend it if you've already invested in other Apple devices, it's cheap, tiny, silent, cool running and the streaming works perfectly.

Like everyone else I use Handbrake for encoding (and DVDfab for ripping - just rip a big batch of disks to my HD and then have a batch script that automates all the encoding) - I just use the iPhone 4 preset in the latest nightly build (then untick the large file option). You shouldn't notice much difference in quality between that and the original source DVD.

Once an untethered JB arrives for 4.3 I might consider going down the XBMC route just to avoid having to use iTunes on the server side.

Edit: if anyone is interested in scripting Handbrake for encoding, this is the command I use to convert existing .avi files to .mp4 - just bung it in a batchfile, change the source and output drives and directories to suit, fire and forget.

Code: 
for %%X in (*.avi) do "C:\Program Files (x86)\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe" -i "c:\source\%%X" -t 1 -c 1 -o "c:\output\%%X.m4v"  -f mp4 -w 720 --loose-anamorphic  -e x264 -q 20 -r 29.97 --pfr  -a 1 -E faac -6 dpl2 -R Auto -B 128 -D 0.0 --verbose=1
 
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I bought the Apple TV 2 a little while ago.
I wanted a device to airplay my music through my receiver, I was looking at the Airport Express but decided I would quite like the ability to stream video as well.
It's pretty good for airplay but I haven't really given movie rentals a go.

I'm slightly put off from using it because it doesn't do full RGB, I have configured my TV for full RGB and have setup the PC, Xbox & PS3 and all looks great apart from the Apple TV which is washed out.

I am quite tempted to jailbreak it and put XMBC on there.
 
I'm considering the ATV2 but got some questions too

1) Out of box will it play Xvid AVIs streamed from a dumb NAS ie NOT streamed from an iTunes machine that is converting formats on the fly etc?

2) What FW does it now ship with as I understand the newest FW isnt JB yet

3) When JB with XBMC added hows the responsiveness

and finally

4) Are there any ways to extend the remote receiver? I'd like the ATV2 out of the way and perhaps something like a Sky remote eye visible only?
 
1) I think it can only stream content from iTunes unless you JB/XBMC
2) No idea, you could end up getting old stock that its a version older?
3) Don't know, interested in finding out though
4) Use an iPod, iPad, iPhone to control it?
 
Methanoid said:
I'm considering the ATV2 but got some questions too

1) Out of box will it play Xvid AVIs streamed from a dumb NAS ie NOT streamed from an iTunes machine that is converting formats on the fly etc?

2) What FW does it now ship with as I understand the newest FW isnt JB yet

3) When JB with XBMC added hows the responsiveness

and finally

4) Are there any ways to extend the remote receiver? I'd like the ATV2 out of the way and perhaps something like a Sky remote eye visible only?
Click to expand...

1) No, you can install XBMC or Plex quite easily
2) No idea
3) XBMC is ace on ATV2, although I use plex
4) It is tiny, seriously no issue here, obviously you can use an IR repeater.
 
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