Sunday, April 01, 2007

Apple TV first impressions

I finally set up my Apple TV today. It was easy to get it up and running, although even though I have used iTunes since it came out, I was not familiar with the Devices list, which is just a way of saying the column on the left side of the screen. Once I figured that out and entered the right info, everything worked pretty well. I had some trouble with accessing a few of the movie trailers -- they either loaded very slowly or not at all. Others loaded quickly and played fine. I watched some TV content -- free stuff from the iTunes store. It wasn't in HD, but it looked fine from across the room, just not close up.

My chosen podcasts seemed to fill up the entire Apple TV, so I turned that feature off and just streamed them which worked nicely. I did load 450 photos I took yesterday from my Aperture library and wasn't as excited about that as I wanted to be. The images can only be viewed as a slide show which has no manual advance feature, so it doesn't work well as a way to review images. Even if it had manual advance, it doesn't allow you to rate the images. That would be great since it's nice to see the pictures on a big screen. I do like the idea that I can look at things I've produced without creating DVDs, so that alone should make the Apple TV something I'll use quite a bit, along with the podcasts and easy access to the iTunes library.

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