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.