Anybody have Apple TV? any good?

Is only the 2nd Gen jailbreakable at the moment?

Lee

 

I have the 1st gen version which is great. Keep meaning to get the 2nd gen version too so I can stream stuff to other rooms etc.

 

Got a 1st gen one a while ago and it's been great - the second gen didn't have an internal hard drive iirc, which made me go for the first gen one so I can store content on it rather than just streaming it

 

Also consider a small pc such as an acer revo. I have one of these running xbmc and it plays everything flawlessly went for an openelec installation and boots very quickly. Plays bluray iso's over my LAN from my nas.

 

Ive got one of these

plays ISO's, divx, xvid, avi,mp4, mp3, images and its TINY. smaller than a packet of cigs so very mobile and plugs into HD and the yellow/red/white AV cables (scart connector if scart needed).

Cant fault it. I use a 500gb external WD HD bus-powered so no unnecessary cables.

 

I've got a very similar set up on the little telly in the bedroom

 

I highly reccomend the himedia 900b , put a internal 2tb for movie collection, but I also stream from my nas.

Plays literally anything bluray iso, 3d bluray iso all hd containers , flac

 

I highly reccomend the himedia 900b , put a internal 2tb for movie collection, but I also stream from my nas.

Plays literally anything bluray iso, 3d bluray iso all hd containers , flac

 

I have a 2nd gen ATV, I think the key diff to the 3rd gen is that it is 1080p rather than 720p.

The ATV2 is excellent, you can store stuff on the ATV1 but I've never missed being able to on the ATV2 because of the way it works. I guess that's the point of why Apple removed that function from the ATV2.

The slight pain is that in default config the ATV2 can only stream content from a PC or Mac running iTunes (which of course means the files have to be in iTunes friendly format (Quicktime etc) rather than the more common mkv or avi). This means you have to push everything through handbrake before you can load it into iTunes for streaming, which is a pain.

I strongly recommend doing what I have done and jail breaking it using season pass and then installing fire core ATV Flash. http://firecore.com/atvflash-black

This allows you to stream _anything_ from PCs or Macs to the ATV whilst still retaining all the original ATV functionality. The new functions are just 'layered' on top.

If you have an iPhone or iPad being able to toss content from those live onto the apple tv is quite cool too, nice to be able to immediately view photos/videos on the big screen without the hassle of upload/download.

 

Will atv stream bluray iso's with hd audio once it's jail broke?

If it does! I'll be waiting for the atv3 jailbreak and buying one.

 

You do not need to pay for FireCore, just jailbreak your Apple TV with SeasonPass and then install XBMC (to stream almost every format) and put add-ons such as IceFilms or 1Channel.ch to watch television programs.

Ant: It depends. The poor little CPU struggles to decode at the required rate. It works better with MKV files than AVI (even though one is just a wrapper). I have had it streaming 6GB BlueRay rips in MKV format.

 

Does it handle the hd codecs?

 

No idea, using G-Spot the (6gb+) videos have:

48000Hz 640 kb/s tot , 6 chnls (3/2 .1)

 

I stream everything from my pc to my blu ray player using iSedora. Most of the films are 10 - 20gb mkvs