Apple TV and the BBC. Big push immanent?

I've seen a bunch of links of how to add streaming radio stations to the Apple TV Take 2. Here's one with some very straight forward instructions.

Sounds cool but I'd like a way to stream other audio sources, like Real Player. While I dislike Real content mostly, no, pretty much entirely because of the desktop player, I'm dependant on it since that is the primary format for listening to BBC radio content. The BBC now have audio podcasts of a lot of their popular shows but the bulk of their content are only available using Real. With all the openness and innovation at the BBC, what with their new AJAX customizable home page and interactive programming I'd like to see more, dare I say contemporary options to consume their content. The BBC has always been very technology forward. How many other TV stations designed, manufactured and retailed their own personal computer?


On a related topic I did see that the BBC was in talks to distribute shows on iTunes like a lot of other major networks. They are also in talks to distribute legal, paid downloads over Bittorrent via corporate face of Azerues, Zeudo. Hopefully we won't see the international restrictions on viewing and buying this content as we did with the BBC desktop client iPlayer. It's annoying to visit a BBC site and not be able to see promotional trailers of a TV show simply because you don't have a UK IP address. The BBC did trial the idea of video podcasts and hopefully this will be a way that they can fill out their selection of shows.


Is the Apple TV even available in the UK yet? Hopefully it doesn't debut with the same lack luster performance as the iPhone.

Cool Apple TV Resource - Apple TV Junkie

I recently found a great resource for Apple TV owners. http://appletvjunkie.com/

It's all about the iTunes content that's available directly on the Apple TV. There's a great list of all the HD movie rentals and HD Podcasts. I know when I'm on the couch my remote always goes to the HD options whenever I'm noodleing around looking for stuff to watch. Apple TV Junkie provides a great service to help you stay on top of all the new movies that get added.

Another cool feature is the weekly 99¢ rental that Apple is offering. Pretty cool. I'm going to keep checking back.

How to convert video for the Apple TV

How am I going to put my own videos on the Apple TV? This the question I asked myself from day one with the device.

Here are the specs of video that the Apple TV supports. OK. My plan? Try to copy stuff over and see what works. Not very scientific, I know. For my tests I move video into the iTunes library and hope that it plays back. This may not always be the case.

The first thing I noticed was that all the videos ended up in the Movies section of iTunes and therefore the Apple TV. It would be handy not to mix home movies with my purchased or rented films but I guess that's OK. A separate section based on your other iLife apps that output video would be cool to have.

Essentially I wanted to copy iMovie home videos of my daughter over to the device. She loves watching herself. I found that many of the videos that I'd converted to .mp4 encoding for upload to video sharing sites like Videoegg and YouTube worked straight away. They were pretty low quality however when viewed on the big screen. Some other formats like .dv did not play automatically and some .mov exports who's settings I'd tweaked also didn't play well.

So how do I convert movies for the Apple TV? I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question so I start looking around for ways to make convert my .dv or .avi files, the highest quality files I'd saved. I wanted convert them into the ideal, Apple approved format of .m4v.

I'd barely laid my hands on a Google search when immediately I'm greeted with the application called VisualHub. It's a very well regarded app with a 'sassy' interface and extremely large number of features. . For the oddly symmetrical price of $23.32 it's not a bad deal.

What else is out there? Handbrake is a great free, all in one converter of DVD video files that has a version specifically for the Apple TV .m4v file format. Unfortunately that release, 0.9.2, is only compatible with Leopard, Mac OS 10.5, which isn't an upgrade I've made at home yet.

The best converter I stumbled over, which I should have guessed was an option all along, was iTunes itself. If a video plays in iTunes I just need to right click or control-click on the file and choose convert to Apple TV. Excellent. I especially liked the fact that if the video was already in a format that the Apple TV could play, whether it was an .m4v or not, then iTunes let me know that I didn't need to convert it at all.

What if iTunes doesn't recognize the video format in the first place? Well I had an alert for one video that I needed to install a video codec listed on the Apple TV. The application I've settled on, for the time being at least, to be my one stop shop for converting content is Quicktime Pro. I bought quicktime pro for a number of small home projects and I was delighted to see that there was an export option for the Apple TV .m4v format. The export format happily had no options to choose from. No frame rates, no dimensions, nothing. Just press the button and wait. Trust in the process in other words.


The only hassle with the method that I've settled on however is the speed. On a G5 a forty minute video takes around one hour and twenty minutes to convert. On my G4 it takes so long I've never stuck with a conversion before bailing. I'm tempted to invest in this little piece of hardware and software from Elgato, the Turbo.264. It's a USB device that performs the bulk of the video conversion task and therefore takes the load of the computers CPU. The manufacturer notes that on a G4 system there are reports of a 10x speed gain. This might be well worth the $89.

I'm going to keep checking into other options as they present themselves. I'm sure that I'll keep having more videos to test with.

How I'm connecting my AppleTV to my network

One of the biggest reasons critics give for not recommending the Apple TV is that you can just hook a computer up to your TV. Well I've had a computer hooked up to the TV for a while now but I never end up using it because it's clunky. I don't have a wireless mouse and keyboard, my wifi bridge is flaky, and it's fan was really loud and distracting. Apart from having a web browser and IM the Apple TV effectively replaces the computer.

The essential reason why the Apple TV replaces a computer is by connecting to your other computers and online. So. What's the best way to get the Apple TV online? How do I connect it to my network? I currently use the Linksys WRT54G router that everyone seems to have. Connecting over Wifi works well. I've had to wait for a HD trailer to rebuffer while playing only twice now. Flickr pics loads straight away and Youtube videos start almost instantly.

Is my current router the best solution? The Linksys can support 802.11 b and g networks. All I had up till now were b and g devices. A g laptop and a b Tivo. I recently made sure the router was set to broadcast in 'mixed mode' whcih seemed to improve the general speed. I was previously under the impression that any slower b device would slow down all the faster g traffic to the slowest common denominator speed. I didn't find this. From a little research I found that modern routers have this mixed mode to try and compensate for this issue. I certainly found that it improved the speed to the Apple TV.

The Apple TV however can take advantage of the even faster n wireless standard. I seriously thought about going to an Apple n router, the Airport Extreme - $179, in order to get maximum performance out of the Apple TV. I read that the Airport Extreme is also a router that can support devices running on slower protocols, b and g without sacrificing all the speed when connecting to faster n devices. I'm dreading renting a HD movie and our rental period expiring purely because I couldn't move enough of the data over my slow network in time.

So, the n router it is then? Well, I'm still toying around with running cable from the router to the Apple TV directly. Cable is cheap and offer the fastest way to move video from one place to another. The router is in a room about thirty feet from where I need to get to. The kitchen and the family room are in my way so there's no chance that my wife even with the love she feels for the Apple TV will let me coil bight blue cables through our kitchen. I'm currently trying to summon up enough courage to take a work lamp, a cordless drill, and a spool of cat-5 cable under the pillar and post floor of my house. I have no idea what's living underneath my there. Particularly after all this rain we've been having. There could be a Noah's Arc of critters that are holding up in there.

So it seems that my decisions are based on my dislike of creepy crawlies verses my dislike of laying down another 180 dollars at my local Apple retailer. We'll see which one of my aversions wins out.

Playing around in the AppleTV interface

I had no idea that the AppleTV interface would be so pleasant. We have been a Tivo household since 2000 and only recently have we switched over to using a DirecTV DVR as our main TV viewing device. We wanted a HD DVR and Tivo HD doesn't support our satellite service. And likely never will apparently. We were certainly disappointed when we left the comfortable and extremely responsive land of Tivo and moved to the somewhat more rigid and more limited world of the DirecTV HR-20. The DirecTV box is usable and it's well worth having a DVR that records in HD over a DVR that doesn't but there isn't an evening that goes by that my Wife doesn't announce to anyone that's listening how much she misses her Tivo.

Enter the AppleTV. The user interface is well and truly on par with Tivo. It felt like coming back home. We found ourselves just cruising around the interface finding where different features lived rather than watching content that was waiting for us on the HR-20 purely from the joy of the interface.

The only minor disappointment came on our second day of usage. After performing the 2.0 software upgrade we lost the cool "swooshy" animation in the menu. Instead we got ourselves a rectangle. Hummm. I guess we didn't spend too much time with the old version of the interface to miss it too much.

Also in terms of interface I wouldn't mind a bigger remote control. My two year old daughter could palm it without too much effort and we wouldn't see it for weeks. I wonder if universal remotes work this sucker? That would be cool.

What's next? Maybe some AppleTV inspired DIY.

Trying out the TV downloads

So ... the question soon became what shall we watch first on the Apple TV? Good question. We opted for a TV show. We're big fans of box sets of TV shows. So much so that we'll wait for an entire season of a show to go by so we can watch the episodes back to back on DVD. We usually buy the DVD's rather than rent so we thought that we'd get a season of something on iTunes. After redeeming a few gift cards my wife opted for the first season of The Tudors, the Showtime original season depicting the early life of King Henry VIII. Cool. I love me some pre-Renaissance monarchs!

Here's my first question ... maybe I'm missing something but why is there no TV show rental? Why only movies? Although we usually buy TV shows I'm sure most people would prefer to rent them. TV shows are usually more or less disposable. You wouldn't want to watch the episodes over and over again. Rental would make sense for seasons of TV shows.

Our other issue with buying the TV season is how does iTunes decide which order that the shows download in? After connecting the Apple TV to our iTunes account and starting the download a show was ready for us to start to watch. It hadn't downloaded but it was playable. Trickplay is the term I've heard used. So you'd expect this to be episode one right? Nope. Four. Followed by ten and then nine after the ATV tentatively toyed with five.

So we decided to go to bed rather than wait for all the downloads to happen. When I got up the next day I checked the status and all the shows had downloaded and I was informed that episode one was ready to watch. So episode one had been the last episode to download. Sweet. Thanks iTunes.

How was the quality? Great. Not high def but very good. It was a little weird though. We're used to the video compression on Tivos and our DirecTV DVR but the Apple TV had a certain flavor that was different. Things like water ripple never looks great in digital video but there were certain quirks with how the picture was rendered on the screen. The biggest issue was with the color red. Large areas of anything red seemed to vibrate and have rough, jaggy edges in a frame that is otherwise perfectly rendered. This is fine except one of the main characters in the show, played by Sam Neil is Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey dresses almost consistently in bright red Cardinal robes. His outfit seems to float three inches in front of the TV screen.

Gotta try some other content. Next up ... photos maybe.

Apple TV Setup

How was the set up? Great. Easy.

There were only certain ways that the cables can be plugged in so it was pretty straight forward. My TV only has one HDMI port so I had to opt for the other option - component cables. While checking out the ports on the back of the unit I thought that I was going to have to make a special trip to the Apple store. I've got plenty of cables lying around but I was convinced that I needed propriatory "Apple" cables. The colors of the five component cable ports were a range of delightful pastel shades not the dark greens and blues tones that I was familiar with.

It turns out that this was purely a stylistic decision and regular component cables work fine. I still took the opportunity to cruise by the San Francisco Apple retail store during one of my lunch hours. Although there is a lot of debate on cable quality and how less expensive cables do exactly the same job as more expensive ones I opted for the Apple recommended ones. Why spend three times more than I had to? Wife insurance, mostly. If the quality of picture coming out of the Apple TV was anything less than pristine I didn't want my decision to cheap out on the cables to be an issue. And hey, like most Apple approved accessories they certainly do look good with the Apple TV even though you only see them when you're standing right over the device.

Software set up was a breeze. After doing two iTunes updates on the iMac to bring up my desktop software version to 7.6 I was good to go. During the set up I realized that the wifi in the Apple TV was certainly better than my other wireless devices. I ended up finding many more neighborhood networks that I usually do. I'm connecting to an 802.11 b/g network on a Linksys WRT54G. More on this later.

I decided to synch photos, TV shows and movies. Initially I decided that I'd synch music then opted not to so I could save on space. The remote decided that this was the moment that stopped responding and I had to restart to the machine by yanking the power. It booted up as normal afterwards.

Any other set up thoughts or concerns? It's weird that there's no hard power button. I could have used one. Can I use other remotes? I'll have to research that. Can I use multiple remotes at once? How long do I have to leave the unit until it goes into standby mode? Does it actually go into standby? I'll have to check on this. I can imagine it might draw quite a bit of power judging from how hot the top of the unit gets.

Next up - gonna' buy and download a TV show.