My Apple TV arrived earlier in the week, but I didn’t get a chance to putz with it until today. My wife is eagerly—but very patiently, at least on the outside—waiting to use it.
Setup couldn’t have been simpler. Plug the power cable into the wall and connect the HDMI cable—the one I ordered from Apple at the same time I ordered the Apple TV; it’s not included—between the Apple TV and the television. Mash the Menu button on the remote to turn it on, and the rest is Apple-simple. Pretty cool, so long as you’re going to rent your visual media from the iTunes Store.
In theory it’s only marginally more difficult if you want to view media stored somewhere on your network: Launch iTunes, select Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing, and enter your iTunes Store account information. If you don’t have an iTunes Store account you’ll have to create one even if you only want to stream media from your local network. Some will find this inexcusable—I almost do. Apple requires you to provide a credit card number to create an iTunes Store account. So, this is a backhanded way for Apple to collect who knows how many credit card numbers from people who merely want to stream media on their local network.
Strike one.
It’s incredibly easy to accidentally rent a movie or television show. My wife says she’ll just have to stay away from the first two menus because we’re olds and her eye-hand coordination isn’t exactly that of a pool shark. Apple put the rental menus in the first two spots for an obvious reason. The local streaming option is way at the far end of the menu, far away from all the pretty movie and television images. But, Apple TV seems to remember where you were when it went to sleep so you don’t have to continually navigate through the first two menus.
I’ve had several weeks to prepare for the arrival of the Apple TV, and I spent a good part of it converting all of our visual media from a variety of formats into the .mov file format—QuickTime 7 Pro‘s default format. That was a mistake. Turns out, the only visual format the Apple TV really understands is .m4v. It’s supposed to understand .mp4 and .mov but in my experience it doesn’t. I don’t really understand why, as .mp4, .mov, and .m4v are all H.264/MPEG-4 files in different wrappers.
The solution is to load the .mov files in QuickTime 7 Pro and export them by choosing File > Export Movie to Apple TV. This converts the .mov files to .m4v format). It’s an incredibly tedious process: Converting one hour of .mov video to .4v format takes a half-hour on a 2.66 GHz MacBook Pro. These files may not be compatible with the iPod Touch and iPhone. For that, choose File > Export > Movie to iPod in QuickTime 7 Pro.
Apple says you can convert anything you can open in iTunes by choosing Advanced > Create iPad or Apple TV Version. These files may not be compatible with the iPod Touch and iPhone either. For that, choose Advanced > Create iPod or iPhone Version in iTunes.
Either way, it’s going to take an unreasonable amount of time to convert your media library to Apple TV format. And it really doesn’t have to be this hard. All of Apple’s iOS devices—Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and whatever comes next—could easily run many video formats natively. Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that does just that. The software is currently available as a preference pane for Mac OS X and presumably could be ported to iOS.
At first glance, it’s hard to figure out why Apple didn’t included Perian or Perian-like functionality in the Apple TV. But when you think about it, it’s obvious: Apple doesn’t care about selling a US$100 box that streams media from anywhere on your network to your television; Apple cares about renting you movies and television shows from US$10 and US$1. If Apple really wanted us to be able to stream media from anywhere on the network, it wouldn’t have boxed our options to a limited subset of what iTunes can play—it would have made the device capable of receiving media streams in any format.
Strike two.
The first batch of conversions is done. Holy smokes—the .m4v files are twice the size of the .mov files. Oh, but they’re gorgeous and they sound wonderful. My beautiful wife is happy, so I’m happy. The Apple TV is a keeper. After all it’s the computers that will be doing the file conversion work, they’ll only have to do it once, and disk space is cheap. And worst case? There will be an Apple TV jailbreak in no time.
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