Apple TV

The Apple TV is a great way to get media content from the internet to your wide screen TV. Here is the low down on how it works!

We bought the original 40GB Apple TV a few years ago. It enables us to access content we have purchased from the Apple Store like movies, TV shows and music and play it on the family room TV and through our stereo system. We have also loaded most of our own media into our library. So in addition to the content we have purchased, we have 90% of our CD’s loaded plus a few DVD’s. We never seem to get around to finishing up the job of loading all our music. We will get around to it someday I guess.

The DVD’s we have loaded tend to be stuff the kids watch fairly regularly, like ‘Cinderella’ for our daughter and a couple of fitness DVD’s for me. We have a DVD player hooked up as well so there is not much point in loading all the DVD’s (though it would be a nice back-up in case we scratch a disk).

We access our digital photos using the Apple TV so we can view them on the big screen and run our favorites as a screen saver. The TV set becomes a digital photo frame montage of favorite family pics. We also use the Apple TV to both search for and watch, podcasts and YouTube clips on the big screen.

Overall the Apple TV works well. The 2 problems we have had with it are:

Network Crashes – when our home network crashes I can sometimes solve the problem but sometimes it needs the skills of our ‘resident network and home theater expert’ who is of course not home. No network = no content and no access to internet content either.
This problem is a function of our set up as we have network hard drives that hold all our media content. We largely solved the problem by storing the kids favorite shows on the Apple TV’s local ‘My Movies’ and ‘My TV Shows’ libraries. I am equipped with delayed gratification, the kids; not so much.

Content Crashes – we had a duel hard drive failure last year and had to restore our media from back ups (which thanks to said ‘resident network and home theater expert’ were up to date). We think that all our thunderstorms and corresponding power failures had been slowly destroying the drives and some of the media. The new drives have all the media reloaded but a few of the files are not quite right and crash the Apple TV. For some reason its the kids Scooby-Doo episodes that seem to be the prime culprits. Our plan is to go back to iTunes and see if we can reload them, but again, this is one of those jobs we haven’t quite got around to. Hey, it will happen…and we now have Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) on all the machine so they can handle a power outage gracefully.

The current model Apple TV is the 160GB. This gives you a lot of capacity to hold media in the local library. So network problems wont affect your enjoyment of the device so much. I also recommend having a good back up system for network media so that you don’t lose it. Why we may now have a few faulty files, we didn’t lose the whole lot as we had an offsite back up system in place. (OK this had nothing to do with me, but I am very grateful to ‘resident expert’).

Here is a pic of the back of the unit so you can see the ports it comes with:

And finally you can buy the Apple TV at the Apple Store for $229. Enjoy!

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