A weekend with the Apple TV

This was "the best test" for the Apple TV and the unit passed with (nearly) flying colors. The very first thing I did was remove Kelly's laptop as the primary device that the Apple TV syncs with. Why would I do this? The main reason I wanted to make this change was to stop having to carry our favorite DVDs to the beach and back each time we drove to the Outer Banks. One Apple TV is much easier to carry than is a stack of DVDs. Kelly's laptop has limited hard drive space so I started ripping my purchased DVDs into iTunes on the Mac Mini (which has an external firewire 250 gig drive, plenty enough space for a bunch of movies for long-term storage).

How did I rip the DVDs? Handbrake. All you need do with Handbrake is download the free software, install, put a DVD into the Mac (then quit the DVD Viewer which autoluanches) and then tell Handbrake to rip a copy. You have a choice of command line or GUI versions of the software. In the end you have a rather large .mp4 file that can be imported into iTunes. Once in iTunes you synch the Apple TV and, in my case, the Mac Mini. The movies are now ready to watch via the Apple TV. How elegant! There is one annoyance you should know: ripping of the DVDs take a LONG time and how fast it will go depends greatly on the machine doing the ripping. I tried to rip one movie using my Mac mini G4 as the ripper but, let me tell you, that whole process was going nowhere. I quit the software after four hours or so of the DVD humming along seemingly doing nothing. The 2.0 Ghz Macbooks fared better on this front ripping a DVD in about two hour's time. Copying the movies over the 802.11g connection takes just short of forever so there was a lot of walking up and down the stairs plugging into the switch in the bonus room to copy three movies at at time. This weekend was the first time I longed for something faster (for general use) than 802.11g. My laptops aren't 802.11n capable, the Apple TV is, so 802.11g is what I'm stuck with for now.

Movie rentals were another issue altogether. It seems that watching a rented movie over the Apple TV is possible if the rented movie resides on the machine that synchs to the Apple TV. Got that? iTunes video content can be viewed over the Apple TV provided that you first pair the Apple TV with the other machine. Pairing a second machine allows a machine running iTunes (PC or Mac) to stream video over the wireless provided that content is not a rented movie. So that kind of sucks. The only reason I believe it is possible to watch rented content sent via the primary iTunes account is under the Apple TV a tab for rental information does exist and it displays a message something along the lines of "no rentals exist to be copied to this (Apple TV) device". The rental tab does NOT exist when the Apple TV info is displayed from a paired machine.

Overall I am satisfied with the Apple TV and the rentals. Saying that I also have not rented a movie and downloaded it directly to the Apple TV, at least not yet, but I intend to do so when movies such as Cloverfield are released. My wife has a few movies she'd like to rent as well.

The new Apple TV "top menu" is a bit more complicated and I really can't believe that Steve Jobs' design people let the menu out the door as is. I say that only because the side-by-side menu under the new software reminds me of right mouse clicks, something that Steve Jobs has long found disagreeable. But that is neither here nor there; the Apple TV, always a fantastic device, has improved greatly with the new software release. Combined with Handbrake the Apple TV is the device I have longed for - a small package I can rip DVDs to and take that content along with me when I travel between home and the beach condo.

Is it perfect? Not quite, but close. A DVD/Blu-Ray drive included would be nice. In fact if it were possible to have a DVD/Blu-Ray option in a Mac Mini I would probably just get a Mini to haul back and forth if - and this is a big if - the Front Row software on the mini could mimic the software on the Apple TV. But I don't see that happening any time soon. I can happily live with my Apple TV for a long time to come.

Apple, now that you have given us the ability to purchase movies directly to the Apple TV and rent content directly the Apple TV what is next? A larger internal drive? Fast processor (for what purpose I do not know)? An internal drive option? Please do tell. Oh, and Mr. Jobs, I'm still waiting for the offer letter for the position of Apple TV Product Manager.