AppleTV Luvvin’

Because I am a hopeless slut for Apple, I got the AppleTV a week or so ago. I figured it’d be like most toys that I get — I’d play with it for a few days, then get bored and put it away. Wii. After a few hours, no freakin’ way. This thing rocks.

First, I didn’t realize how nice it was to have something that seamlessly integrated iTunes with my component stereo system. I have my Tivo set up to do this, but the Tivo/iTunes navigation is painful and slow. Now, listening to iTunes via my stereo works great, and it works with my regular Harmony remote for my TV and stereo.

Second, I desperately needed a widget that would bridge the gap from computer to TV. I just didn’t know it. I’ve never really watched movies on my computer — the screen was too small, the sound wasn’t quite right, and there’s just something wrong with watching a movie while sitting in an office chair.

I discovered TVShows at about the same time as I got the ATV. TVShows is a fairly simple little app that lets you subscribe to TV shows, scours the RSS feeds of popular torrent sites, then auto-launches your bittorrent client to download episodes when they’re available. [Yeah, this is a legal grey area. Whatever.] TVShows + BT is arguably just as useable as cable TV + Tivo: the latest House downloaded about three hours after it aired, and the newest Family Guy episode completed just fifteen minutes after it aired.

A downside to torrented shows is that they’re usually encoded as XViD .avi, which the ATV won’t play. On the Mac, I use the free FFMPEGX app to transcode to h.264. On WinXP, I use Nero Recode, which is OK but pricey.

Having some TV shows viewable on my TV is not really new. The new thing, the concept where the ATV excels, is this: I can now rip my DVDs to h.264 and store them all in a media library.???? I’ve had the drive space, but I haven’t had the ability to watch them on my TV. Now I can.

I don’t have very many movies that I want to watch over and over, but the ones that I like, I want ready access. With these movies now safely and securely stored in my redundant media library, I can watch them whenever. I don’t have to fiddle with cases, or the DVD player’s balky eject button. As a bonus, clearing all those DVD cases off my shelves gave me lots more free space.