The Blog Less Traveled

I thought I’d do a little write-up on the Apple TV. I’ve shown the unit to several people over the last year and most never knew it existed or knew very little about it. For those not familiar with it, the Apple TV is a media entertainment center made by Apple, Inc. It’s essentially a compact computer with no screen or keyboard. You connect the unit to your widescreen TV via HDMI or Component Video connections. The unit is quite compact at about 7.5” in width/length and about 1” high. You’ll need a broadband Internet connection, a wired or wireless network connection and an iTunes account from Apple. To take full advantage of all features, you really need to install iTunes on one of your computers. The unit can work with Apple or Windows computers.

The unit provides two methods of playing media files on your TV. You can stream them directly off your computer or transfer them first to the Apple TV and then play them. Either way works fine unless you have a marginal wireless network in which case streaming some video files may get somewhat choppy at times. In addition to letting you view all the photos in your iPhoto library or music/video/podcast files in iTunes, you can rent or purchase pretty much any movie DVD. Also, you can rent most TV shows in case you miss an episode. The unit also lets you connect to YouTube and watch anything available on that site. The quality of most YouTube videos isn’t that great but it’s nice to be able to watch it on the widescreen, nonetheless.

The other day, I hacked the Apple TV and installed Boxee software on it. This is alpha software that isn’t officially supported by Apple. Boxee is a media management software application with a user-friendly interface that can run under Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, etc. The really cool thing about Boxee is that it lets you connect to the Internet and get access to dozens of websites that have free movies and TV shows. You can connect to CBS.com and Hulu.com (NBC and Fox) and get access to all their current and past TV shows. Instead of paying to watch a past TV show on iTunes, you can get it for free, legally. If you want to see old TV series classics like Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Have Gun Will Travel, etc., it’s all there for free. There are also thousands of free classic movies available on other media websites that Boxee is set up to access.

I highly recommend the Apple TV to anyone that has a widescreen TV. The ease of displaying all your various media from one location will make you wonder how you got along without it. At only $229 for the 40GB version, it’s definitely a worthwhile investment.