Tír Na HiFi

I have just taken delivery of an Apple TV version 2 and have to say that my initial views
are very favourable.

I know it's not a piece of hi-fi equipment, however, for €119.00 inc postage it makes a very good
job of streaming the music in my Itunes Library to my amplifier and sounds excellent.

I also have a US Itunes account so can rent movies that haven't been released over here yet and
will be watching my first downloaded movie toinight (the girl who played with fire) so will let you
know how I get on tomorrow.

I have quite a large number of movies in MP4 format for my Iphone and these even at the lowish
resolution I converted them for Iphone are not bad when played through the Apple TV via HDMI.

Anyone else out there taken the plunge with an Apple TV?

Andy S wrote:I have just taken delivery of an Apple TV version 2 and have to say that my initial views
are very favourable.

I know it's not a piece of hi-fi equipment, however, for €119.00 inc postage it makes a very good
job of streaming the music in my Itunes Library to my amplifier and sounds excellent.

I also have a US Itunes account so can rent movies that haven't been released over here yet and
will be watching my first downloaded movie toinight (the girl who played with fire) so will let you
know how I get on tomorrow.

I have quite a large number of movies in MP4 format for my Iphone and these even at the lowish
resolution I converted them for Iphone are not bad when played through the Apple TV via HDMI.

Anyone else out there taken the plunge with an Apple TV?

When I first read about this little gadget my initial response was I've got to get one.Then common sense kicked in and I started to disbelieve the hype. Let us know how you get on Andy...

I haven't tried the Apple TV (though it is an incredily small and impressive form factor) but I have a mac mini connected to my TV via HDMI and optical out to my surround processor, works great for netflix, iTunes etc.

Well

Iv'e had my Apple TV2 for a couple of days and watched my first rented HD Movie yesterday.

Firstly, set up on the Apple TV was simplicity itself, connect a optical digital cable a HDMI cable and plug it
in. It then detects your wifi signal, you switch on home sharing, input your WEP security key if you have one and then just
log into your itunes account with user name and password.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good the music stored on my computer played through the apple TV into
my Tag Mclaren AV32R Processor, of course the real great thing is the quick access to the albums and tracks
stored in Itunes.

I will do a comparison of the Apple TV versus my Tag McLaren DVD32R when I have some spare time.

My broadband internet connection is not very fast, approx. 3Mb so I was interested to see how I went on
when renting a movie from the US Itunes store.

I selected a HD version of the film The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo which according to Itunes was a 2GB download.
I understood that I should be able to start watching the film more or less straight away after a few minutes of streaming
but the film showed as loading and playable in 90 minutes, which is approx. the time it took to fully download. I may be
doing something wrong, I will have to check on another Forum.

As I am writing this I am renting the HD version of The Expendables from Itunes in the US and it is showing as playable in
over 2 hours!

I will rent an SD movie next and see if I can get instant play from this rental.

Picture and sound quality on the HD download was excellent but not quite as good as I get from SD on my
Tag Mclaren DVD32R which has to be one of the best SD DVD Players ever made.

I will also try renting something from the Irish Itunes store to see if that makes any difference.

Obviously the reason I am using a US Itunes account is to get access to movies which aren't on release on DVD
over here yet. The fact that they are currently taking a long time to load isn't a problem to me at the moment as
I am unlikely to want to rent a movie on a spur of the moment decision, I can select a movie for the evening and
let it download in the background in the morning.

So first impressions of the Apple TV2 are very favourable, decent sound from Itunes when looking for background
listening or having a party and good quality film reproduction on rentals.

I also have a number of films on Itunes which are converted to small MP4 format for my Iphone, these are obviously not
as good quality as the rented films from Itunes, but I converted a video file at the highest resolution into MP4 format
for TV and this gave excellent results.

I will report further when I have finished playing with this little gem!

Andy