i’ve got apple all over my tv > 8/04/2008

It was only a matter of time until I got an apple tv, so when a friend was visiting the states I asked him to make a little detour into apple’s glass box (If you follow it you'll know which apple store I’m talking about). I am not the proud owner of a 160GB apple tv, and thanks to a small programme called isquint and an american itunes account it’s filled with stuff!

For those of you who don’t know what an apple tv does, it is essentially an ipod for your tv. The same way your ipod synchronizes with itunes on your computer the apple tv does, but with emphasis on video content and without the wires. I did have to convert most of my videos to get them to work (thank you isquint!) and then add them to my itunes.

It was all easy to set-up and the synchronization didn’t take quite as long as expected (it works over my home wireless network so is much slower than, for example, filling an ipod over USB). You don’t need to synchronize everything as it can also play stuff from your itunes by steaming it directly, or you can rent and buy movies and tv directly from the box. Once they have downloaded from the internet enough you can start watching them, this was great for tv shows as they were normally ready to watch moments after buying them.

After a few weeks of converting videos and getting it set-up just right I must admit it’s fantastic. I’ve already spent way too much money in video rentals and tv series (got to keep up with Desperate housewives and Lost!) and nearly filled my external hard drive with my itunes folder (there was no way it would fit on my laptop’s hard drive). There are a few little issues but mostly surrounding my wireless network and I think I’ve managed to sort them. If you have lots of digital video (and preferably a computer with a large hard drive) then it makes it really easy to access all that content even if you do have to spend time renaming, adding and converting all the video.