Internet television, Apple style

From a consumer electronics point of view, Apple TV pigeonholes easily: It is a set-top box, about the size of a portable DVD player, that turns a wide-screen television or monitor into a hard disk-based media player and wireless streaming media receiver. It plays the video, audio, and images stored on any iTunes-equipped Mac or PC on your LAN straight to your home theater while leaving your computer hidden away in the spare bedroom where it belongs.

Further, Apple TV is nicely portable, so the next time someone invites you over and asks you to bring a movie, you can bring 20 or 30, along with a whole rack of music CDs. With Apple TV, a power cord, one skinny HDMI digital video/audio cable, and Apple’s six-button remote in your party duffel, you’ll never pay for beer and pizza — or Veuve and beluga — as long as you live.

Apple TV can work for a living, too. Say sayonara to the tacky gray A/V cart in your mahogany-paneled conference room. Swap the one-track DVD player in your trade show booth or reception area for Apple TV and get random access to hours of promotional and educational content.

Soul of a media machine If the simplest technology to use is the hardest to create, Apple must have poured a lot of brainpower and sweat into Apple TV’s 8-by-8-by-1.25-inch box and its barely there remote. I suppose Apple expended half of that effort figuring out how to squeeze a silent-running Intel-based PC into that case without using an external power brick, and the other half carving away at the Mac software platform until it fit an embedded platform and a $299 price tag.

Apple TV is an Intel PC. It hides its PC-ness well and appropriately, but it uses the flexibility of a disk-based OS and software to great advantage. For example, whenever you put Apple TV on your LAN via its Wi-Fi or Ethernet interfaces, it checks with Apple for new releases of its software and upgrades itself automatically. Apple will use that avenue for bug fixes, but it can also enhance Apple TV’s functionality by pushing a button in Cupertino. A free software update due from Apple in “mid-June” will add a YouTube streaming tuner, and it’s a cinch that there’s more direct broadband streaming capability to come.

Among the better heeled, Apple TV is every bit as simple and portable as I’ve described. In the ideal configuration, all it takes to bring Apple TV to life is a wide-screen HDTV or EDTV, or a monitor with an HDMI, DVI, or analog component input. For audio, Apple TV has analog stereo and TOSLINK digital audio outputs. Not everyone who has HD, or a suitably high-resolution LCD or plasma monitor, has wide-screen, so I found Apple’s requirement for wide aspect-ratio monitors to be arbitrarily limiting. I found that Apple TV does work with a standard square-aspect (4:3 ratio of width to height) digital monitor, but the image suffered the horizontal squeeze that one sees when non-letterboxed wide-screen content is played on a standard-aspect display. Apple TV could and should support 4:3 monitors by including letterboxing in the software.

My 30-inch Cinema Display made an acceptable wide-screen monitor. But like most computer monitors, it lacks the image controls that one finds on a monitor built to display video. I later replaced the Cinema Display with a proper HDMI HD video monitor, and that monitor’s video-optimized filtering and scaling, as well as its more modern LCD panel, showed a marked improvement in video quality. So I agree with Apple that a wide-screen computer monitor, while it works, is hardly the best option.

Syncing and streaming All you need to do to play video, audio, or images stored on a remote iTunes client that shares a Wi-Fi or Ethernet LAN with AppleTV is select the computer by name; browse that system’s iTunes library by content category (just as you would in iTunes or on an iPod); and select the video, audio, or images you want. Apple TV starts playing the content more or less immediately. It caches the content at network speed during playback, meaning that after you’ve watched a movie for just a few minutes, Apple TV has the whole film stored on its hard drive. Even if the network link to the remote iTunes client is lost, the movie keeps playing.

Apple TV can download any iTunes content you select and store on its 40GB or 160GB hard drive, enabling disconnected and portable operation. Later releases of iTunes give you the option of downloading to your Apple TV only the content you haven’t yet viewed. Syncing large quantities of content to Apple TV is much faster over Ethernet than wireless, even when you use ultrafast 802.11n Wi-Fi over a short distance. Still, Wi-Fi is plenty fast. While Apple TV’s Wi-Fi supports slower 802.11b speed, this isn’t nearly fast enough to stream HD video; Apple points this out in the documentation. Apple TV’s dual LAN links do not afford the device the ability to act as a gateway or a base station. It is strictly a LAN end point.

Switching from Ethernet to Wi-Fi and back is done automatically when you plug or unplug an Ethernet cable. In my tests, making the switch while a background sync operation was underway consistently locked up the device’s networking. It froze the sync in midcompletion, a problem that persisted through multiple reboots of both Apple TV and the iTunes client (a MacBook Pro), but it inexplicably resolved itself later. I related the problem to Apple, which told me it hadn’t encountered it before. I haven’t repeated the test since the June software update; it may have been fixed. Still, I recommend that you leave Apple TV connected over either Wi-Fi or Ethernet long enough to complete its initial sync with an iTunes client.

Six buttons are all you need Apple TV’s GUI is similar to that of OS X Tiger’s Front Row, which is itself inspired by the iPod. The full-screen, hierarchical menu interface takes extraordinary advantage of high resolution and wide aspect. The white-on-black text is large and smooth. List scrolling and selection are smooth and responsive; I never encountered a need to hit a button on the Apple Remote twice or move around to align the beam with the sensor. These seem like small things, but you don’t realize how squinty and archaic other consumer electronics on-screen GUIs are until you see how quick, artful, simple, and eye-friendly Apple TV’s is.

Apple TV has its own spin on the iTunes’ Cover Flow interface. Cover Flow’s 3-Dish view lets you rifle through your music by cover art as if you were flipping through a box of CDs. Apple TV displays the disc’s name and cover art, but uses a placeholder image for music for which you have no cover art. The display font is also too large to accommodate long CD titles; I found that I often had to click a CD to find out what was on it.

When used for viewing digital photos, Apple TV is nothing like any CE component I’ve seen. It calls in QuickTime effects to transition from image to image, a feature that makes it especially suitable for use in presentations or trade show booths.

Apple TV won’t play Windows Media, Real, Flash, DiVX/XviD, and other proprietary or esoteric formats. Considering you can’t copy media in these formats into an iTunes library, that’s not much of a limitation. Mac and PC content encoders and transcoders — I use freeware FFmpegX and HandBrake, as well as the $25 QuickTime Pro on my Macs — will convert whatever you have, legally obtained if you please, for playback on Apple TV. Apple TV’s best and most efficient video format is H.264, a variant of MPEG-4 that’s ubiquitously supported in video tools. All QuickTime Pro 7 releases since Apple TV’s introduction have one-click Apple TV encoding profiles that create H.264 video with beautiful results.

Music is a no-brainer. MP3 and AAC formats prevail with no discernible limitations on bit rates. The music, movies, and TV shows that you purchase from the iTunes Store all play on Apple TV. Apple TV counts as one of the five PC/Mac playback devices you’re permitted to authorize. Apple TV authorizes once, using a numeric passcode, when it first connects to a new iTunes client. I found that switching Apple TV from Ethernet to Wi-Fi required reauthorization with known iTunes clients.

Apple TV combines superior ease of use and superb output quality. It plays anything that an iTunes client can, and with the help of freeware media format converters, it can handle just about every other format as well, including DVDs. Apple’s arbitrary restriction to wide-screen displays is puzzling, but if that isn’t a showstopper for you, then Apple TV won’t disappoint. The imminent link to YouTube, and presumably other Internet-based media resources in the future, will only increase its appeal.