OK, I am late but what do you do with your Apple TV?

[Mac1337]

For the first time I am thinking about getting an Apple TV. The one application that is pushing me over the edge is the prospect of video ichatting on our wall-mounted TV. I have also heard people raving about watching stuff on youtube but youtube quality is crap even on a lowly computer monitor. Would a blue-ray player with internet port be any sort of an alternative?

[C(-)ris]

You need a Mac Mini to do video chat with your TV. AppleTV is just a playback device.

[lazydays]

My AppleTv's (3 of them) push music to various parts of my house. I have itunes on a schedule to play different kinds of music in the morning when I wake up and in the afternoon when I come home from work. So I use mine for music playback every day.

I also put all of my favorite movies and tv shows into itunes and use the Appletv's to play them. I very rarely use my Dish receiver anymore.

All of my vacation pictures are in iPhoto and the appletv screen saver displays them. This has been a big hit at family get togethers as the grandparents get to see all the recent pictures of the kids and our adventures.

As Chris said there is no ichat for the appletv. I wish they had used the iphone OS as that would have allowed the purchase of apps for the appletv.

[Mac1337]

Can't I patch my laptop screen to the TV via AppleTV? In effect a mirroring device. How is this different from playing your movie collection in iTunes and watching them on TV? I knew I don't fully get AppleTV.

[Seacrest]

I use mine to find wormholes in the space-time continuum and squeeze my flabby ass through them. Then I travel back to the mid-sixties, hide on the set of Gilligan's Island, and shoot HD video of Tina Louise and Dawn Wells in their trailers.

[C(-)ris]

Dakota wrote:
Can't I patch my laptop screen to the TV via AppleTV? In effect a mirroring device. How is this different from playing your movie collection in iTunes and watching them on TV? I knew I don't fully get AppleTV.

It is just a playback device. No different than an iPod, except that it can stream content from a machine on the network as well.

[silvarios]

Dakota wrote:
Can't I patch my laptop screen to the TV via AppleTV?

Ummm. No. The Apple TV is a streaming media box. Some of the content can be download straight from the internet, some of the content can be accessed from your LAN. The Apple TV has 10/100 ethernet and 802.11n WiFi, the latter supporting up to WPA2-AES 64 character HEX keys. The Apple TV outputs to your TV via component or HDMI for video and analog RCA or optical audio. There is a USB 2.0 port, but I don't think it does anything, not officially.

The Apple TV is compatible with the iTunes Store content (except apps) and any other content compatible with iTunes. Your photos are also likely compatible with the Apple TV (check the file formats to be sure). Either from iPhoto, another compatible application library, or from a folder.

There are a few ways to access this content from your Apple TV:

• Stream from one or more computers through iTunes. This method requires the host computer to be awake and configured for shared libraries.
  
• Sync an individual computer's compatible content with the Apple TV. This lets the host computer sleep or be powered off because all the content you sync is stored on the Apple TV's internal hard drive. Syncing does not preclude streaming content from other computers.
  
• Add content from the iTunes store directly to the Apple TV's interface. This content is synced back to your iTunes account on whichever computer you used to do the initial Apple TV configuration.
  
• The Apple TV can directly access YouTube, movie trailers (from Apple), internet radio (I would imagine the same directory that iTunes uses), and podcasts (again the same directory as iTunes).

Hope this helps.


Nathan

[DavidS]

I recently bought a used Apple TV and love it. My Mac Mini has a 1TB MiniStack that has all our music in iTunes and also stores my movies and TV shows. I hacked the Apple TV to use Boxee and XBMC and stream video from the Mac Mini in the basement.

I also enjoy some of the video Podcasts (HD Travel ones especially).

[Article Accelerator]

Dakota wrote:
Can't I patch my laptop screen to the TV via AppleTV?

No, nor do you need to do that--just hook your laptop up to the TV directly.

How is this different from playing your movie collection in iTunes and watching them on TV?

For one thing, Apple TV provides much greater convenience and ease of use. However, Apple TV is much more than a just movie playback device. See silvarios's posting above and these:

http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1...msg-589011 (add Internet radio to that list)
http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1...msg-825000
http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1...msg-811868

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

[iaJim]

I find that I don't do anything with mine. I wish it could communicate with ABC.com to play full episodes of missed shows.