[mythtv-users] Who's going to be the first?

JWA jwa at macbidouille.com
Thu Sep 2 00:07:40 UTC 2010


On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 16:47, Gabe Rubin <gaberubin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>> The operative word there is "looks".
>>
>> I just don't see what's so great about it. For the same money you can get many units that are not locked down, and have
>> internal storage as well.
>>
>> Other than the physical form-factor, what's the big deal? The ability to over-pay for programming and have Apple tell you
>> what you can and can't do?
>>
>> Apple hype only goes so far, sooner or later you have to deliver the goods.
>>
>
> Can't you stream anything from inside your network as well on this
> thing (well maybe not anything, I don't know what codecs and
> containers this device can play) so you could theoretically get this
> and play all your media, including music, through you home
> entertainment system in a very nice form factor with a great UI.  In
> other words, you don't need to "rent" content from apple (but the
> option is always there to do so)?

It supports h.264, mpeg-4, and motion jpeg. And it'll have to be .m4v,
.mp4, or .mov (except m-jpeg can be avi).  No avi/divx. No mkv. So I
would have to convert the majority of my video library.  And for audio
it's aac, alac, mp3, aiff, or wav.  So it's a little better, but I'd
still have to convert some stuff.

> I realize I can do this now with myth.  But for most, that is not an
> option.  And I am willing to bet that as nice as the myth UI has and
> is still becoming, it doesn't compare to the UI on this device (and
> for that matter no other device out there compares).
>
> For lots of people, that is a huge selling point and $99 is pretty
> cheap for the hardware.

Seeing as how it's basically an iPad without the screen, I'd imagine
the power draw from the AppleTV would be incredibly low.  That'll be
one advantage.  That plus $99 will entice a lot of people.  And if
someone finds a way to hack it to add more support for formats, or if
it were to work with UPNP to stream myth recordings, I'd be
interested.


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