I received an apple tv2 as a christmas present and I have not been convinced that it is really a great product. It still is not great but has more appeal than most of the current boxes around. At least if you have some mac gear lying around. I just decided to sell my iPad for lack of usage. Besides consumation I cannot do much and without pdf annotations I really should look at KNO.
I had an apple tv 1 and it was an ok product with the help of xbmc or plex it was even greater, but xbmc and plex fail me regularily and apple tv2 passed the test with my family members. They can use it and it works albeit I was able to crash it with airPlay from an iPhone.
Screen saver, origami is great but it should do random pictures which it is not good at. And with home share to go into the picture section it takes now up to 2 minutes (we have 32000 photos in iphoto) before I can start browsing and did I already mention that I have to manually scroll down in events until the newest photos appear and that takes at least 20 seconds.
And we have more and more movies in iPhoto but they won't show.
What I love is ease of use, homeshare, apple remote on ipad and the limited but functional ui. renting movies is easy and fun and very fast (at least for me) to start streaming. Over christmas I learned of AirFlick and other tools from erica sadun and the future looks very bright and promising. With the help of AirVideo and AirFlick it will be possible to stream any content over to the apple tv2. Just what you could do with a ps3 or almost. But maybe even more.
I still cannot listen to my wifes favorite radio station but maybe I can get it to stream from vlc over to apple tv2 with airflick. But at the moment even I am not able to do so, since I failed to stream from airvideo even with the correct id. The error on apple tv2 came for more than 10 times and then I just stopped trying.
But hey, apple always sells hope as in next time they get it right, they were so close. After almost half of a year with the iPad and going through iterations with fastpdf, goodreader, cloudreader and ibooks I should know better, but I am sucked in and just added another level of addiction. Hey I really think about converting all my DVDs with handbrake (using nightly builds apple tv2 preset) over into iTunes again. (Almost there, maybe AirFlick and AirVideo come to the rescue).
Oh my, I even tested elgato Eyetv again, repluging my hybrid and trying to find ways to bring content into the itunes library. Did I mention that I couldnt stop me from buying an elgato 264.hd turbo stick at 80$ even though I read a lot about the crappyness that it brings, but hey I have had a new thrust of hope and that's all it needs. At least I can escape the WD TV nightmare, not that the box is not ok but it is much more limited in giving hope (did you ever try to really do some cifs or nfs link, I even don't remember if only one of those were supported or not with ccrad, well I failed miserably. The apple tv 1 was customer friendly. I have not bought a popcorn and will not. Streaming is and has been the solution to most of my problems except that I really badly need cloud storage and sync to all to become one.
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