Follow up on Apple TV Apps and Tools

This is a follow up on my search for useful software that will help me get more out of my Apple TV.

My first discovery was a veteran app that I'd never heard of until recently --iSquint. iSquint comes from the makers of Visualhub, iSquint just converts video to iPod or Apple TV format without all the fancy settings and fine tunings that it's bigger sibling offers. I think the main win for the app is it's speed. It out paces Quicktime Pro and can convert some videos to some format is real time. However when I tried it on a couple of videos it choked on their formats. I'm going to wait until there's a more standards compliant piece of video that I want to move over to the Apple TV and then I'll put it in a head to head race with Quicktime on another machine.

The other app that's really interesting me answers a question I had about listening to BBC Real streams on the Apple TV. Airfoil from Rogueamoeba. Itdoes exactly what I'm looking for. $25 will buy you the ability to play audio of any type that can come out of your Mac or PC's speakers to a variety of other networked devices around your home. Nice. I've got visions of playing recordings of Mao like orders for my family to assembly for daily exercise sessions through my new, over head public address system.

I really like this idea of extending my general computer content to the Apple TV. I don't simpley mean entertainment content like audio or video but I'd really like to see IM alerts be able to appear in the interface. Or even a way to plug in a camera and do AV web chat through the TV. I'm sure Apple's going to do something interesting with that USB port sooner or later.