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.