Apple TV

I don't have one yet, but I am glad to hear of your experience with it. Do you have to have it synced with a computer, or can it stand on its own?

 

I'm getting one soon. I'll let you know what I think when I get it set up.

 

I was hesitant to buy it. I know I need to get the wireless router/backup for my Mac Time Machine.

Have you rented any movies yet? Wonder how those look.


Antony

 

Santa brought me one for Christmas. Best present I received. We sit around and watch the family photos scroll across the screen while our favorite music plays. I've searched You Tube and watched movies. Awesome little device. My only worry is how hot it gets while running, but it is a lot of fun..

 

I simply hooked my PC up to my HDTV. Free mod! iTunes & web surfing from the couch...

 

all Mac stuff gets really hot. My laptop is crazy when its working hard


antony

 

I currently have two AppleTV devices... both were purchased before the new update. I can say that they have become much more useful since the Take Two update.

Anyway in addition to watching downloaded TV shows and YouTube stuff... I have been using the AppleTV to store and watch old home videos. Right now I am preserving all of my old VHS tapes of when the kids were little, our wedding video, etc. It is amazing to see how quickly some of these tapes have started to degrade. I.e. rainbowing effects and general softness to the picture... some of this is the quality of the original tapes, etc. But over time it will only get worse...

The video capture card I have is Windows only... so I have been capturing the raw video and then moving it to my Macbook Pro and using iMovie to edit. My newer camera hooks right up to the Mac... I then sync the finished vids now with titles and a few transitions over to the AppleTV. Now these videos that have been packed away for years can be watched in seconds...

The ease of doing all of this has taken the AppleTV from being a novelty that only I was playing with, to something the whole family plays with.

Scott

 

I got mine almost a year ago for free from a swag tent at the SF allstar game. I finally got around to hooking it up after reading this post. After hooking it up it downloaded the new upgrade and within minuites I was downloading movie rentals from I tunes. I have a 50" lg plasma with 1080i. and a surrond sound system with 5.1. The high def movies look awesome. The picture quality on my lg is amazing and the sound is phenominal. The only down side is the relativley long time it takes to down load a movie, about 4 hours. But I am quickly learning that you rent two or three in advance and let them sit on the hard drive until you are ready to watch. You have 30 days to start watching a movie after you have rented it. Once you start watching you have 24 hours to finish viewing or rewatch as many times as you like. Overall I am very impressed.

Carl

 

Scott,
Can you elaborate as to how you get your vhs tapes to digital format?? I have been curious about this for a while. Thanks
David

 

Sure David, I have a video capture device made by Pinnacle.. it plugs into my USB port on my Windows machine and it has the standard video and audio connections you would normally see on any VCR or other device. I simply run the S-Video and Audio cables from my VCR to the capture device and use the included software to capture the video to the hard drive on the computer. It saves the videos as AVI files.. they are very large and are kind of in RAW MPEG mode.. I capture at the highest quality it allows me to and the files I generate run about 15GB per hour of video.

There are a few factors that play into getting nice smooth video capture.. First is having a USB 2.0 port. I would say if your computer was made or purchased in the past three years you are probably ok on that.. USB 2.0 can support about 440 MB/sec of data transfer. The second factor is having a fast hard drive. I have a SATA drive depending on the version will do 1.5 GB/sec or 3.0 GB/sec transfers.. in my opinion either will work but the faster the better. My captures always seem smooth and look fantastic... well as good as they can coming from such a crappy medium as VHS.

As I said in the previous post once I have the video on the hard drive I import it into my Mac and do my editing there... Having a fast network helps there too.. I have a Gigabit switch (you can find a decent 5-port Linksys at Best Buy for $50.00) that I use for my network and can copy these files in minutes.. try copying a 20GB file on a 100MB switch and it will be almost two hours.

Probably more than you wanted to know..

Scott

 

I guess you're right. My iPhone gets really hot also.

 

My new Mac Pro is nice and cool

 

iPhones too..?!

some good branding there...lol

Antony

 

Edit a magazine spread in Photoshop... you can fry eggs on the bottom of a MacBook doing this