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I recently revisited the Apple TV2 due to the new AirPlay just released for iTunes and iOS 4.3.
This actually looks like a nice idea. With centralized data in iTunes you can access the same library with multiple AppleTVs. An AppleTV is $99 so a good price for a client/STB machine.
The main upside is with AirPlay you can stream from your iTunes library/machine to any iOS device and also transfer content without needing to sync via USB.
However... I did find some downsides...
1. AppleTV is limited to 720p. Not a big problem for me now, since I have a 720p TV, but in the future it could be an issue.
2. AppleTV doesn't support very many formats. Most TV I download which, even though it is H.264, are also .avi and or .mkv files. AppleTV doesn't support these. So, most all content I download would have to be re-encoded to mp4/m4v file format. This takes time... no more instant watch after d/l-ing.
3. Meta data pulling for iTunes seems a dark art. There is 1 great app called iFlicks that will d/l Movie and TV metadata from the internet and add the info to your files and move the files to iTunes. Problem is, this is Mac only... I couldn't find a Windows equivalent that people relied on. MetaX looks like the best but most people say it doesn't always work. I don't want to have to rely on a specific platform for storing/serving/encoding video to my TV.
Sigh... so it was looking good... but I don't think I will go this way. Getting a Boxee Box looks like what I am going to do even though I like the idea of Plex's centralized library and metadata much better. Boxee supports up to 1080p and pretty much every file format I would d/l too.
BOb
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