Apple TV on my TV

I picked up my Apple TV today from Fedex since I wasn’t expecting the delivery a day early.  It is quite a good looking device, both physically and what it puts on the screen.  The little remote might bother me a little as I’ve come to expect more from remotes since I got my Logitech Harmony remote.  I wonder if Apple has included discrete codes in the device, so I can setup a macro on my remote that will turn on my receiver and start shuffling through my music.  I don’t want to have to turn on my TV every time I want to listen to music.

Anyway, time to play with it will have to wait since the Sweet 16 is on.

Update: Well, 2 things I was hoping to do with the Apple TV don’t seem possible.  I wanted to be able to control my music playing on the Apple TV from my laptop from anywhere in the house.  The 2 ways I was thinking that would work would be by having it show up as remote speakers in iTunes for playing my local iTunes stuff, a la AirTunes, or by actually selecting the media that are on the Apple TV from the iTunes devices interface.  Neither of these work.  Is this a deal-breaker for me?  I’m not sure yet, but playing music through my stereo without the TV on was one of the things I was expecting from the Apple TV.


Update 2: So far I’ve mainly been using it for listening to music and it sounds fine, I just shut the TV off once the music starts. I don’t think it sounds better than my Archos Recorder v1 from 2002 running Rockbox through S/PDIF, but the UI is nicer looking. The only video I’ve watched so far was from The Merlin Show in hi-res, and it looked ok, better than SD but not as good as HD. I was able to hook up my Harmony remote to work reasonably well, but still discrete codes for playlists or something would make things better. These instructions helped get things setup with the remote. The slide shows are nice and look great, I think they are my wife’s favorite feature so far.

Posted by Lee Marlow Sat, 24 Mar 2007 01:04:00 GMT

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Comments

  1. Abdul Qabiz about 3 hours later:

    didn’t I comment on this entry? Seems, it got deleted or blocked..

    Anyway, never mind.

    -abdul

  2. Lee about 3 hours later:

    Abdul,

    You did, but I accidently deleted it when updating the article. Sorry about that.

    -Lee

  3. barry 2 days later:

    Uh yeah I was really hoping to do that too. It is certainly nice to be able to control the music in the living room when I’m in that room, but a lot of times I like having the music playing throughout the house, i.e. playing synchronized from the computer and an Airport Express. I was hoping to put an Apple TV in the living room and move the Airport Express to the kitchen. That’s a bummer.

  4. Nick 3 days later:

    Oh come on Lee, we want some damn pictures man!

    What sort of inputs and outputs do we have? I’m far too lazy to go to the site, you know that. What resolution does it output? Does it upconvert?

    I was under the impression that we’d have the front row ui. Days later how do you feel about it? Etc.

  5. Lee 4 days later:

    I took some pictures and wrote down the specs and put them up on a nice site at http://www.apple.com/appletv/. For a bunch of other cool things to do try out http://www.appletvhacks.net/. I’ll update the post with some more of thoughts shortly.

  6. Daniel Wanja 4 days later:

    Ars Technica as a good review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/appletv.ars

  7. Nick 4 days later:

    Lee, I’ll give you 50 bucks for that pretty domain of yours.

    Daniel, I saw that article in my reader this morning but haven’t gotten the chance to read it yet. I’ll do it promptly.

    Also, Lee, how much bigger is the rockbox than the atv?